Most of the Facebook ads advice written for local businesses is about targeting, and targeting is the part Meta has largely taken away.
Interest lists have been thinned out, exclusions went in 2024, and since February 2025 a new leads or sales campaign starts with Advantage+ switched on. What you can still decide is how the account is built.
That is the choice this article is about. The local service accounts that work in 2026 fall into one of three shapes. Which shape fits depends on your price point and whether you have a CRM. The rest is creative and budget.
What Meta changed between 2025 and 2026
Meta rebuilt the campaign set-up, swapped its ad delivery engine and cut more targeting options, all inside about eighteen months. Each change leaves fewer levers for you.
The set-up change came first. On 7 February 2025 Meta announced a simpler flow in which, as Search Engine Land reported, AI optimisations apply automatically to sales, app and leads campaigns, "removing the need for marketers to choose between manual or automated campaigns."
Jon Loomer's breakdown of the same documentation explains what is still yours to set. Location, minimum age, excluded custom audiences and languages are hard controls. Maximum age, gender, custom audiences and detailed targeting become suggestions Meta may look at before widening the audience. Override placements or budget and the campaign can drop out of Advantage+ status.
Then there is Andromeda, Meta's ad retrieval system. Loomer describes it as the first step of delivery: "it picks the short list" of ads a person could be shown before the ranking models choose between them. His reading is that targeting now happens largely in the ad itself, so he recommends one campaign per goal, rarely more than one ad set, and far more creative variety.
In August 2025 MediaPost reported an Ads Manager notice saying that "some detailed targeting options have been combined" and that from 15 January 2026 ad sets using the removed options would stop delivering. Dataslayer's year-end review counted 83 documented changes in 2025, including the end of detailed targeting exclusions.
The piece that matters most for local lead generation came on 30 October 2025, when Meta made Advantage+ leads campaigns available worldwide. Social Media Today listed what came with them: SMS verification of phone numbers on instant forms, a single campaign that can serve both instant forms and website forms, and free Conversions API lead events for CRMs connected through Zapier, up to 100,000.
"Built specifically for advertisers focused on generating high-quality leads." Meta on Advantage+ leads campaigns, via Social Media Today
Meta's own figures in that announcement are a 14% lower cost per lead and a 10% lower cost per qualified lead on average. Loomer asks whether the 10% reflects better leads or just a tidier set-up. Treat it as Meta's claim, not an independent benchmark.
The three structures side by side
The three structures differ on how many campaigns you run, where the lead lands and how much data you feed back to Meta.
| 1. Single Advantage+ leads campaign | 2. Qualified form campaign feeding a CRM | 3. Retargeting plus reviews | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Lower-ticket, same-week jobs: cleaning, gardening, locksmith, small repairs | Jobs needing a quote or survey: boilers, kitchens, dental implants, conveyancing | High-ticket, long consideration: extensions, solar, cosmetic treatment, private healthcare |
| Campaigns | One, one ad set | One, one ad set, plus a CRM connection | Two: a cold prospecting campaign and a warm retargeting campaign |
| Lead capture | Instant form, "more volume" type, or Messenger/call | Instant form, "higher intent" type, with custom and conditional questions | Website form or booking page, with the form campaign as a fallback |
| Offer | A clear, dated local offer | A free quote or assessment with a stated response time | Reviews, case studies and the owner answering objections |
| What Meta optimises to | Form submissions | Submissions, then qualified lead events sent back from the CRM | Site actions (quote request, booking), then CRM outcomes |
| Minimum sensible UK budget | About £10 to £20 a day | About £15 to £30 a day | About £20 to £40 a day across both campaigns |
| Main risk | Volume of unqualified enquiries | Form friction lowers volume if the questions are badly chosen | Spending on warm audiences that are too small to deliver |
The budget rows are our starting ranges and they sit inside the published UK guidance. JDR Group suggests at least £500 to £1,000 a month for testing, roughly £16 to £33 a day. Trade2Base's guide for UK trades puts a working budget at £10 to £20 a day and estimates £300 to £600 a month should return 15 to 40 leads, depending on the trade and the town.
Structure 1: one Advantage+ leads campaign with a radius and an offer
The first structure is a single campaign, a single ad set, a tight radius and an offer good enough to carry the ad on its own. You accept Meta's defaults and put your effort into the creative and the response.
This suits businesses where the job is small, the decision is quick and the owner can call back the same day. A gutter clean at a fixed price, or a boiler service for a set fee in a named town. The same trades often run Google Ads for tradesmen in parallel, where the call is usually the better conversion.
Set the location to people living in your service area, with a radius of 5 to 15 miles for most trades, as Trade2Base advises. Leave age and gender as suggestions, not hard limits, otherwise you may lose the Advantage+ status that Meta's cost per lead claims depend on. Use the "more volume" instant form type, which Loomer's instant forms guide describes as the quick-fill default.
The reason to keep it to one ad set is the learning phase. Tinuiti's explainer gives Meta's rule of thumb as about 50 optimisation events within seven days before an ad set leaves learning. At £15 a day and a £20 cost per lead you will get around five leads a week. Split that across three ad sets and none of them will ever settle.
Expect some junk. People submit pre-filled forms they barely looked at, which is why Facebook lead ads generate junk unless the form is built to filter. Turn on SMS verification if the phone number is what you need, and plan on calling within the hour.
Structure 2: a lead form with qualifying questions feeding a CRM
The second structure keeps the single campaign but changes the form and connects the outcome. You ask two or three questions that separate a real job from a tyre-kicker, and you send the answer back to Meta so it learns what a good lead looks like. A kitchen fitter does not want 40 leads a month if 30 of them are renters asking about a splashback.
The "higher intent" form type adds a review screen before submission, which Loomer says improves lead quality on its own. Custom questions can be multiple choice, short answer or conditional. PPC Hero's walkthrough notes that forms allow up to 15 questions, and that "the more questions a person is required to answer the more friction the form typically generates." Three is usually the limit for a local service.
The questions that do the work for most of our local clients are:
- A multiple-choice question that identifies the job (for example, "What do you need?" with four or five named services and an "other" option).
- A timing question with fixed answers: within a month, one to three months, just researching.
- A postcode or town field, or a question that confirms the person owns the property.
Conditional logic can route a "just researching" answer to a close-form page so the details are never submitted. That cuts volume, and the cost of chasing people who were never going to buy.
The CRM link is what turns this from a form tweak into a structure. Leads sit in Meta for 90 days, so they need to go somewhere. Connect the form to your CRM, mark each lead as qualified or not after the first call, and send that status back through the Conversions API. Meta's October 2025 update made this free for up to 100,000 events through Zapier. Once the campaign has enough qualified events, switch the optimisation to that event instead of raw submissions, the same conversion signal logic that decides whether Google Ads chases buyers or form-fillers.
Structure 3: retargeting plus reviews for high-ticket services
The third structure splits the account into a cold campaign that introduces the business and a warm campaign that answers objections with proof. Nobody books a £15,000 extension from one ad.
Run the cold campaign with the same radius and Advantage+ defaults as structure 1, but send people to a page on your site, not a form. The Pixel and the Conversions API then build audiences of people who visited, watched most of a video or opened a form without finishing. Clicks Geek's guide lists the standard warm audiences as website visitors from the last 30 to 60 days, video viewers at 50% or more, page engagers and partial form opens.
The warm campaign is where the reviews go. Screenshots of Google reviews with the reviewer's first name and town, a short video of a customer walking through the finished work, the owner answering the questions every prospect asks on the first call. These ads are cheap because the audience is small, and they are the ones that get quoted back to you in the consultation.
The main risk is audience size. A local business with 1,500 site visitors a month cannot spend £30 a day on retargeting without showing the same ad to the same person every day. Clicks Geek suggests £5 to £15 a day for retargeting and treats a frequency above 3.0 as a fatigue signal. Under a few thousand warm people, keep it to a few pounds a day and let it accumulate.
Creative that works for a local service business
The creative that performs for local advertisers in 2026 is the kind a national brand would never sign off. The owner on camera, holding the phone, talking about one job in one street.
Trade2Base's list of what performs best for UK trades is before-and-after photos, 30 to 60 second smartphone walkthrough videos, and "just finished in [town]" posts. Stock imagery is a wasted ad slot. Only the first two lines of copy show before the "see more" cut on mobile, so the town and the offer go there.
Andromeda changes how many of these you need. Loomer's advice is to build ads for different people and contexts, not versions of one idea, and the old six-ad cap per ad set went in February 2025. For a local business that means a review ad, a before-and-after ad, a price ad, an owner video and a seasonal ad in the same ad set, and letting delivery decide which goes to whom.
The format data cuts against the assumption that video always wins. Motion's 2026 creative benchmarks, summarised by Coupler, covered more than 550,000 Facebook and Instagram ads and found the highest hit rate for text-only ads at 11.6%, with UGC at 7.56% and high-production assets at 6.97%. A plain screenshot of a five-star review, with a line of context, is a text-only ad.
What a lead should cost
A local service lead on Meta in the UK should land somewhere between £10 and £40, and the best published benchmarks are American. WordStream's 2026 Facebook benchmarks, reported by PPC Land, put the median cost per lead at $27.39 across 452 US lead campaigns, with home and home improvement at $42.95 and dentists at $61.56, the highest of any category.
Trade2Base's UK ranges are a vendor's estimates, not a dataset, but they are the only published UK figures by trade we have found: £8 to £20 for plumbing and gas, £12 to £35 for roofing, £20 to £60 for extensions. If your account is paying double those after a month, the problem is almost always the offer or the creative, not the audience.
Cost per lead is also the wrong final number. The figure that decides whether to keep spending is cost per booked job, and only structure 2 or 3 can give you that.
Which structure to pick
Pick by ticket size and by whether you can follow up. If a job is under a few hundred pounds and you can call back within the hour, run structure 1 and spend your time on the offer. If every enquiry needs a quote, run structure 2 and do not launch until the CRM is connected and someone owns the first call. If the price runs into thousands, run structure 3 and accept that the warm campaign will be small and slow.
All three share one thing: the account is simpler than it was in 2022. One campaign per goal, one ad set, many ads, and a feedback loop that tells Meta which enquiries turned into money. If an agency proposes a dozen ad sets split by interest, ask them what they think Andromeda is for. The same scrutiny you would apply to a UK Google Ads agency applies to whoever runs your Meta ads.
If you want someone to build one of these structures and run it against a cost per booked job, our paid media team does this for UK service businesses, and you can get in touch here.