Solved: Facebook Ads cost per lead has increased dramatically

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look at the situation you described. A cost per lead jumping from £15 to £30 is understandably frustrating, especially when it feels like nothing significant has changed on your end. It's a common problem and one that sends a lot of businesses into a panic, tweaking creatives and audiences endlessly without getting back to those 'good old days'.

But I'm going to be brutally honest with you. Your obsession with the £10-£15 CPL might be the very thing holding you back. Chasing the lowest possible cost per lead is often a fool's errand that leads to low-quality enquiries and wasted time. The increase you're seeing isn't necessarily a disaster; in fact, it might be closer to a realistic cost for acquiring a genuinely valuable customer in your industry. The real issue here isn't a single metric doubling, it's about whether you have a robust advertising strategy built on sound business maths, or if you're just throwing things at the wall and hoping for cheap clicks.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how I'd approach this. We're not going to focus on getting your CPL back to £15. We're going to focus on building a system that predictably brings in profitable customers, even if the leads cost £30, £40, or even more.

We'll need to look at your business maths, not just your ad metrics...

The first and most important shift in thinking is to stop anchoring yourself to an arbitrary CPL. That number is almost meaningless without context. The only question you should be asking is: "How much can I afford to spend to acquire a customer and still make a healthy profit?" This is where most businesses go wrong. They don't know their numbers.

The answer lies in understanding the relationship between a customer's Lifetime Value (LTV) and your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). For a business like yours, which likely involves high-value, one-off purchases rather than a monthly subscription, we can simplify LTV to the average profit from a single customer project.

Let’s run through a hypothetical calculation. You’ll need to plug in your own real numbers, but this will illustrate the point. It's the kind of basic financial modelling that should drive every single one of your marketing decisions.

First, what’s an average customer worth to you?

This £1,000 is your effective 'LTV' for this single transaction. It’s the maximum amount of money you have available to spend on acquiring that customer before you start making a loss. Of course, you don’t want to spend all of it.

A healthy, sustainable business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio. This means for every £3 of value a customer brings in, you spend £1 acquiring them. This gives you a robust margin for overheads, reinvestment, and of course, profit.

So, with an LTV of £1,000, your target CAC would be £1,000 / 3 = £333.

Now, let's work backwards to your lead cost. How many leads does it take to get one paying customer? If your sales process is decent and your leads are of a reasonable quality, you might convert 1 in 8 leads into a sale.

So, your maximum affordable Cost Per Lead (CPL) is £333 (Target CAC) / 8 (Leads per Sale) = £41.62.

I've put this into a table to make it clearer:

Suddenly, that £25-£30 CPL you're seeing doesn't look so terrifying, does it? It looks like a perfectly acceptable, and potentially very profitable, cost. Your earlier £10-£15 leads might have been lower quality, costing you more in time and effort to convert, or you might have simply gotten lucky during a less competitive period. Relying on luck is not a strategy. What if the leads at £30 are from more affluent postcodes and convert at a rate of 1 in 5? Your CAC would plummet, and your business would grow faster. You have to know you're numbers.

I'd say you are fishing in completely the wrong pond...

Doing the maths is the first step. The second is realising that for a service like yours, Facebook is probably not the best place to be spending the majority of your budget. Think about the customer journey. When does someone decide they need new blinds or shutters? It’s rarely an impulse decision while scrolling through photos of their friend's holiday.

It’s a high-intent purchase. It happens when they move into a new house, complete a renovation, or when their old blinds finally break. At that moment, they have a problem and they are actively looking for a solution. They don't scroll on social media for it; they go to Google and type in "shutter company near me" or "blind fitters in [Your Town]".

You are using an *interruption-based* platform (Meta) to find people who need a service that is almost always bought via an *intent-based* search. That's a fundamental mismatch.

For services, especially local ones, you want to be where people are actively looking for help. This means your primary focus should be on Google Ads, specifically Search Ads and Local Service Ads. I've seen this time and time again. We're currently running a campaign for an HVAC company in a competitive area, and they're seeing a CPL of around $60, which is hugely profitable for them given the value of a new boiler installation. On the other hand, we’ve run ads for home cleaning services where the CPL was just £5. Your niche will fall somewhere in that range, likely towards the higher end because it's a higher-value, more considered purchase.

On Google Search, you're not trying to convince someone they have a problem. You're just presenting your business as the best solution to a problem they already know they have. This pre-qualifies your audience in a way Meta simply can't.

You should be targeting keywords like:

• -> "bespoke shutters [your city]"
• -> "wooden blind installers near me"
• -> "emergency blind repair"
• -> "plantation shutters cost"
• -> "made to measure blinds company"

You can also enable call extensions so people can ring you directly from the ad, and lead form extensions to capture details without them even needing to visit your site. This is about removing friction and catching that intent at the exact moment it appears. If your budget is limited, I would seriously consider pausing your Facebook ads entirely and shifting that entire spend to a well-structured Google Search campaign. The quality of leads will almost certainly be better, even if the CPL is comparable or slightly higher.

You probably should rethink your audience entirely...

Okay, let's say you insist on making Meta work, perhaps for retargeting or building brand awareness in your local area. The fact that you're just "testing different creatives" tells me your underlying targeting strategy is likely flawed. Most businesses make the same mistake. They create a sterile, demographic-based profile that tells them nothing useful.

A profile like "Homeowners, aged 30-60, living within a 20-mile radius" is a recipe for generic ads that speak to no one. It's lazy. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their *pain point* or their *trigger event*.

Your Ideal Customer Profile isn't a demographic; it's a *problem state*. Forget who they *are* and focus on what they're *experiencing*.
-> The "New Mover" Nightmare: "We've just spent a fortune on this house and our nosy neighbours can see everything we're doing. We need privacy, now."
-> The "Renovator's Regret": "We've decorated the whole living room, it looks amazing, but these cheap, yellowing plastic blinds ruin the entire effect. It feels unfinished."
-> The "Sun-Drenched Sufferer": "Our south-facing bedroom is like a greenhouse from 5 am in the summer. We can't sleep in, and the furniture is fading."

These are the emotional drivers that lead to a sale. Your job is to find these people on Facebook. How? By targeting the signals associated with these nightmares.

Here's how I'd structure the audiences, moving from coldest to warmest:

You run separate campaigns for these different temperature levels. You don't show a new mover the same ad you show someone who has already visited your website. The cold audiences get a message that agitates their problem, while the hot audiences get a message that pushes them to take action. This kind of segmentation is far more powerful than just swapping out a picture of some shutters for another.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you understand your customer's true pain, you can stop selling blinds and start selling solutions. This needs to be reflected in your ad copy. Most ads in your industry are dreadfully boring. "High-Quality Blinds & Shutters. Free Quote. Est. 1998." It's wallpaper. It's instantly forgettable.

You need to use a framework like Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS).

Problem: State the nightmare directly. "Tired of harsh glare turning your living room into a no-go zone?"
Agitate: Twist the knife. Make them feel the pain. "You can't watch TV without squinting, your furniture is fading, and you've lost a whole room of your house to the sun."
Solve: Present your service as the clear, easy solution. "Our bespoke thermal blinds give you complete light control, protect your furnishings, and let you reclaim your space. Get a free in-home design consultation this week."

This is so much more powerful. It connects with a real emotion. Your creatives should then reinforce this. Instead of a sterile product shot, show a before-and-after video. Show a customer smiling in their beautifully lit, private living room. Show the transformation. People don't buy drills; they buy holes in the wall. People don't buy shutters; they buy privacy, comfort, style, and a solution to an irritating problem. Your advertising must reflect this reality.

This is why simply "testing creatives" is not enough. If the message behind the creative is weak, no amount of testing will save it. You need a powerful, emotionally resonant message first, then you can test different ways of delivering it (image vs. video, different headlines, etc.).

This is the main advice I have for you:

To really fix this, you need to stop thinking about individual ads and start thinking about your entire lead generation system. A rise in CPL is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a weak strategy. Here are the steps I would take immediately.

As you can see, this is a lot more involved than just tweaking a campaign. It requires a strategic overhaul of how you think about and execute your paid advertising. It’s about building a multi-platform machine that works together, with each part designed to do a specific job.

Getting this right can be the difference between a business that struggles from month to month and one that has a predictable, scalable engine for growth. This is precisely the kind of strategic work we specialise in. We help businesses move past the panic of fluctuating metrics and build robust systems that deliver consistent results.

If you'd like to go through this in more detail and have us take a look at your current setup, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can audit your accounts together and map out a concrete plan of action.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh