Solved: Facebook Ads Delivering Low Quality Leads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look at the situation you described with your Facebook ads for your auto detailing business. It's a classic problem, and honestly, one I see all the time. Getting leads for $2 sounds great on paper, but if they're all time-wasters and tyre-kickers, you're just burning cash and, more importantly, your own time following them up.

The good news is, this is almost always fixable. It's not about finding one magic ad, but more about getting the foundations right: your campaign objective, your offer, and who you're actually talking to. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a roadmap on how I'd approach turning this around. It's about shifting from chasing cheap leads to attracting valuable customers.

First off, let's talk about that 'Leads' objective...

Right, this is the heart of the problem. When you choose 'Leads' as your campaign objective on Facebook, you are giving the algorithm a very simple, very direct command: "Find me the largest number of people, for the lowest possible price, who are most likely to submit their contact information via an on-platform Lead Form."

And the algorithm is incredibly good at its job. It seeks out users who have a history of clicking on lead ads and filling out forms. These people are, in a way, 'trained' to do it. They see an interesting picture, click a button, their details are auto-filled, and they hit submit without a second thought. There's almost zero friction. But here's the uncomfortable truth: the people who are easiest to get a lead from are often the least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Their attention is cheap because they're not in high demand from advertisers who are optimising for actual sales. You're effectively paying Facebook to find you an audience of non-customers.

It's like standing on a high street offering free samples of a luxury steak. Loads of people will take the free sample, but very few of them were ever planning to come into your expensive butcher shop to buy a whole joint. The 'Leads' objective gets you the sample-tasters, not the steak-buyers.

You're seeing the result of this right now: a high volume of 'leads' that go cold the second you try and talk to them about money. They weren't really "into it" in the first place; they just performed a low-effort action that the algorithm prompted them to take.

You'll need to switch from Lead Forms to a proper Conversion campaign...

So, to answer your question: no, I wouldn't just run the same ad as a sales campaign *as well*. I would stop the lead campaign entirely and move all my budget to a 'Sales' (what used to be called 'Conversions') campaign. This is a fundamental shift in strategy.

With a Sales campaign, you place the Meta Pixel on your website and you tell the algorithm to optimise for a specific action that a high-intent prospect would take. This could be:
-> Submitting a detailed quote request form on your website.
-> Clicking a button to call your phone number.
-> Actually booking a slot in your calendar via an online scheduling tool.

The best one is usually an actual booking. When you do this, you're telling the algorithm: "Don't just find me people who fill out forms. Analyse everyone who actually *books a detailing service* on my site, and go find me thousands more people who look and behave exactly like them."

The system learns what a real customer looks like for your specific business and actively seeks them out. This is the 'secret sauce' of the platform. You're leveraging billions of data points to find people who are genuinely interested and ready to act.

Now, the big caveat: this will be more expensive. You will not get leads for $2 anymore. For local services, a good quality lead can cost anything from $10 to $50, or even more in competitive areas. I remember one of our best consumer services campaigns was for a home cleaning company which got a cost of £5/lead. But we're also running a campaign for an HVAC company in a competitive city, and they're seeing costs of around $60 per qualified lead. Your costs will probably be somewhere in that range. But here's the thing – they're happy to pay it, because those leads turn into thousands of dollars worth of work. A $60 lead that converts is infinitely better than twenty $2 leads that all ghost you.

I'd say your offer is probably attracting the wrong crowd...

The second piece of this puzzle is your offer. The objective gets the right people to see your ad, but the offer is what convinces them to act and, crucially, filters out the ones you don't want.

Think about it. What is the offer in your current ad? If it's something vague like "Get a free quote" or "Expert car detailing services", it's far too broad. It invites everyone to enquire, especially those who are just price shopping and looking for the cheapest possible option. Your offer needs to do some of the qualification work for you.

Instead of selling a generic service, you need to sell a specific solution to an urgent, expensive problem. Your ideal customer isn't just someone who wants a 'clean car'. Their real 'pain' is deeper.

• Maybe it's the new parent who is horrified by what their kids have done to the back seats of their expensive SUV and feels embarrassed to give anyone a lift.
• Maybe it's the professional who's about to sell their car and knows that a £400 detailing job could add £1,500 to the selling price.
• Maybe it's the enthusiast who sees their performance car as a major investment and wants to protect its paintwork with a ceramic coating.

These are specific problems. So you should create specific, 'productised' offers to solve them. For example:

Instead of: "Car Detailing"
Try: "The 'Family Car Rescue' Package: Full Interior Deep Clean, Stain Removal & Sanitisation"

Instead of: "Get a Quote"
Try: "Pre-Sale Enhancement Detail: Maximise Your Car's Resale Value. Includes Machine Polish & Headlight Restoration."

These offers do several things. They speak directly to a specific customer's pain point, making the ad feel incredibly relevant. They justify a higher price point. And they scare off the people just looking for a quick £20 wash and vac. Your offer becomes a filter, ensuring that the people who do click through are already pre-qualified and interested in a premium service.

We'll need to figure out what you can actually afford to pay for a customer...

This is where most small businesses get stuck. They focus on keeping the cost per lead (CPL) as low as possible, without knowing what a customer is actually worth to them. The question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?"

To figure this out, you need a rough idea of your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). For a service business like yours, it's a fairly simple calculation:

(Average Price Per Job) x (Number of Jobs Per Year) x (How Many Years They Stay a Customer) = LTV

Let's say your average full detail is £300. A great customer might come back for a top-up detail twice a year. And if you provide a brilliant service, they might stay with you for, say, 3 years.

LTV = £300 x 2 jobs/year x 3 years = £1,800

So, one good customer is worth £1,800 to your business over their lifetime. A general rule in marketing is that you can afford to spend up to a third of your LTV to acquire a customer. This is your maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Max CAC = £1,800 / 3 = £600

That means you can afford to spend up to £600 to get one new long-term customer onto your books. Now let's work backwards. If you know that you can convert, say, 1 in every 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% close rate), you can calculate what you can afford to pay for that lead.

Affordable Cost Per Lead = Max CAC x Lead-to-Customer Close Rate

Affordable CPL = £600 x 10% = £60

Suddenly, paying £25, £40, or even £60 for a high-quality lead who is actively looking for a premium service doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a smart investment. This math completely changes your perspective and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, useless leads.

To make this easier, I've built a little calculator for you. Play around with the numbers – your average job value, your estimated conversion rate on your website (how many visitors book), and your sales close rate (how many leads you turn into jobs). See how it affects what you can afford to pay per lead.

You probably should rethink your targeting from the ground up...

Once you have the right objective and a compelling offer, you need to get it in front of the right people. Your targeting is the final piece. Just targeting "people interested in cars" is too broad and will give you mixed results. You need to think like your ideal customer.

Forget demographics for a minute. Your ideal customer isn't a demographic; they're in a specific 'problem state'. You need to target that problem. So, what car-related interests, behaviours, and pages would a person with a high-value 'detailing problem' follow on Facebook or Instagram?

Here are some ideas to test, split into separate ad sets:

• Brand Enthusiasts: Target people interested in specific premium car brands like Porsche, Audi RS models, BMW M, Mercedes-AMG. But layer it! For example, people who like 'Porsche' AND live in the top 25% of UK postcodes by income. This filters out the dreamers from the owners.
• Care Fanatics: Target people interested in high-end car care brands like Gtechniq, Auto Finesse, Swissvax, or Chemical Guys. People who follow these pages are not looking for a cheap wash; they appreciate the craft.
• Competitor Audiences: Are there well-known, high-end detailers or detailing magazines in the UK? Target people who follow their pages.
• Lookalike Audiences: This is hugely powerful once you have data. Take a list of your best 100-200 past customers, upload it to Facebook, and create a 1% Lookalike Audience. Facebook will then go and find people with thousands of similar data points. This is often the best-performing audience you can build.

You should structure your campaigns to reflect a customer journey. Start with these 'cold' interest and lookalike audiences to find new people. Then, run a separate retargeting campaign to bring back people who visited your website or watched your videos but didn't book. Showing them a testimonial video or a before/after gallery can be just the nudge they need to commit. This structure ensures you're not just shouting into the void, but building a system to attract and convert customers.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull this all together, here is a summary of the strategic shifts I'd recommend. This is a move away from just 'running an ad' to building a proper customer acquisition system.

As you can see, getting good results from paid ads is about more than just the ad itself. It's a system of interconnected parts, and when one part is wrong (like your campaign objective), the whole thing tends to fall apart. It takes time, a bit of budget for testing, and a very methodical approach to get right.

This is obviously where having an expert can make a huge difference. We could help you implement this entire strategy, from setting up the conversion tracking and campaigns to helping you refine your offers and test audiences, making sure every pound you spend is working as hard as it possibly can to grow your business.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your current setup and give you some more specific, actionable advice. Feel free to let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh