Why your Facebook and Instagram ads get likes but no enquiries

The pattern is familiar: a post of your best work gets hundreds of likes, a few kind comments, and not one phone call. Nothing is broken in the way you might fear. The settings, the tracking, the page behind the ad and the ad itself each decide who Meta shows it to and what those people do next, and a fault in any one of them turns budget into applause. This guide works through all four in the order that usually matters, then gives you a checklist to run against your own account.

Are your ads set up to find enquiries at all?

Every campaign in Meta Ads Manager starts with an objective. Meta currently offers six: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales. The objective is not a label. It tells Meta's delivery system which result to hunt for, and the system is very good at finding exactly that result.

• Awareness finds people who will see the ad, as cheaply as possible. It is for being remembered, not contacted.
• Engagement finds people who like, comment, share or watch. On a service business account, that is the source of the likes with no enquiries.
• Traffic finds people who click links. Many of them are habitual clickers who leave within seconds.
• Leads finds people likely to submit their details, through a form on your website, a Meta instant form, a call or a message.
• Sales finds people likely to complete a conversion event you define on your website. Some service businesses use it with an enquiry as the conversion.

If your ads were made with the Boost button on a post, check the goal it used. Boosting is quick, but it is easy to end up paying for engagement, and engagement is the one thing a service business cannot bank.

Meta gives you more of whatever you ask for. If your campaign asks for likes or clicks, likes and clicks are the success, and the lack of enquiries is not a malfunction.

The fix is simple to state. For enquiries, use the Leads objective, and choose a conversion location that matches how your buyers like to get in touch. The harder part is making sure Meta can actually see the enquiry happen, which is the next section.

Can Meta see the enquiries you do get?

A Leads campaign pointed at your website only works if Meta knows when a visitor has enquired. Without that signal, it cannot learn who enquires, so it falls back on showing your ad to people who click, and you are back to paying for traffic.

Two tools carry that signal:

• The Meta Pixel is a short piece of code on your website that reports what visitors do in their browser. It sends events, which are named actions such as a page view or a form submission. Meta publishes a list of standard events; for a service business, Lead (an enquiry form submitted) and Contact (someone getting in touch by phone, email or chat) are the ones that matter, with Schedule if people book appointments online.
• The Conversions API sends the same events from your server straight to Meta, rather than from the visitor's browser. Browsers, ad blockers and privacy settings stop some Pixel events arriving; the server copy fills the gaps. Meta recommends running the Conversions API alongside the Pixel.

When both send the same enquiry, Meta needs to know it is one enquiry, not two. It does this by matching the event name and an event ID sent with each copy, and it only deduplicates events received within 48 hours of each other. If the IDs do not match, your reports double count, and your cost per lead looks better than it is.

Here is how to check your own setup in about fifteen minutes:

1. Open Events Manager in Meta Business Suite and find your Pixel. If there is no Pixel, or it shows no recent activity, this is your first fix.
2. Use the Test Events tab, submit your own enquiry form on your phone, and confirm a Lead event arrives once, at the moment of submission, not on page load.
3. Check that the event shows as received from both the browser and the server. If only the browser appears, the Conversions API is not set up.
4. Click your phone number and WhatsApp button on the site. If those are how most people contact you and nothing fires, Meta is blind to most of your enquiries.

A common fault is a Lead event that fires when the contact page loads, rather than when the form is sent. Meta then reports a lead for every visit to that page, optimises for people who open contact pages, and your reported cost per lead looks excellent while the inbox stays empty.

Should the ad open a form or send people to your website?

The Leads objective lets you collect enquiries without anyone leaving Facebook or Instagram. These are instant forms: a form that opens inside the app, with some fields filled in from the person's profile. They are convenient, and that is both their strength and their weakness.

Meta offers two instant form types. More volume is built to be quick to fill in and send on a phone. Higher intent adds a review step so people confirm their details before submitting. You can also add your own questions, which is where you filter out people who were never going to buy.

Instant form leads have two practical traps. First, they are stored by Meta, and Meta only lets you download them for 90 days after submission, so connect them to your email or CRM (customer relationship management system, the place you track enquiries) from day one. Second, a pre-filled form can be sent almost by accident. If your team reports that people do not remember enquiring, that is the form being too easy, not the ad failing.

For higher-value work, a landing page usually earns its extra friction, because the buyer arrives having already seen the reasons to choose you. The guide to landing pages for paid ads covers what that page needs, section by section, and how to track it.

What happens after someone taps the ad?

If the ad sends people to your website, the page they land on decides whether a click becomes an enquiry. The most common mistake is sending every ad to the homepage. A homepage is written for everyone: past customers, job applicants, suppliers. The person who tapped an ad for one specific service has to hunt for it.

The page behind an ad needs to pass four tests on a phone, because that is where nearly all Facebook and Instagram taps happen:

1. It matches the ad. If the ad promised a free design visit, the first screen says "free design visit", in the same words.
2. It loads fast. A page that takes several seconds to appear loses people who were only half committed. The guide to Core Web Vitals explains how Google measures this, and the same fixes help ad traffic.
3. It proves you are worth contacting. Real photos of your work, your review rating with the number of reviews, the area you cover, and a rough price range if you can give one.
4. It makes enquiring easy. A short form, a tap-to-call number and, if your buyers use it, WhatsApp, all within one thumb's reach.

If your Google traffic has the same problem, with plenty of visitors and few enquiries, the fault is often the website itself rather than the ads. The guide to traffic but no enquiries goes through the site-wide fixes, and why a website can make a business look cheap covers the design signals that put off premium buyers.

Does the ad look like a business someone would hire?

Creative is the image or video and the words around it. For a service business it has a different job from creative for a product. Nobody can add a kitchen, an accountant or a roof repair to a basket. The ad has to make a stranger trust you enough to hand over a phone number.

What tends to work for services:

• Your real work, not stock photos. A finished job, a before and after, the workshop, the van outside a client's house. Buyers can tell the difference instantly.
• A person. Short phone-shot video of the owner or lead tradesperson explaining one thing, such as what happens on a design visit, often outperforms polished brand films because it answers "who will I be dealing with?"
• One clear offer. A free quote, a design visit, a fixed-price survey, a callback the same day. "Get in touch" is not an offer.
• Who it is for, and where. Name the town or area and the type of job. That filters out people you cannot serve before they cost you money.
• Proof in the first line. Years trading, review rating with the count, a trade body membership. Facts, not adjectives.

What tends not to work: clever headlines that need a second read, carousels of every service you offer, discounts that make a premium business look desperate, and the same single image running for months until everyone in your area has scrolled past it many times.

Run a few genuinely different ideas side by side, not a dozen near-identical variations. Different offers or different angles teach you something; a blue button against a green one usually does not, at service business budgets.

How do you know if the ads are working?

Judge ads by what each enquiry cost, then by what each won job cost. Likes, reach, impressions and click-through rate are diagnostic numbers. They help explain a result, but they are not the result.

Cost per lead is the amount spent divided by the number of genuine enquiries. "Genuine" matters: if a quarter of your form leads are spam or people outside your area, your real cost per lead is a third higher than the one Ads Manager reports. Keep a simple sheet of every enquiry, where it came from, and whether it turned into a quote and a job.

The number you can afford depends on your own business: your average job value, how many enquiries turn into work, and your margin. The guide to what a lead should cost shows how to work out your own ceiling from those three numbers, with a worked example, rather than relying on industry averages that may not fit you.

Be patient for the right reason. Meta's delivery system goes through a learning phase after a campaign starts or is significantly edited, and Meta says an ad set is "Learning limited" when it is unlikely to get around 50 optimisation events in the week after the last significant edit. A local business spending a modest budget may never reach that, which is fine, but it means results move slowly and day-to-day swings mean little. Judge over weeks, and avoid editing the campaign every few days, because each significant edit restarts the learning.

A campaign with a cost per lead you can afford and a steady flow of jobs is working, even if its likes are low. A campaign with thousands of likes and no jobs is not working, whatever the report says.

Are Facebook and Instagram the right place for your ads?

Facebook and Instagram ads interrupt people who were not looking for you. That is useful when your work is visual, when buyers can be prompted ("I have been meaning to redo the kitchen"), and when you can define your area and your buyer clearly. It is harder when buyers only look for you in an emergency, when they search for the service by name, or when the job is too small to justify the cost of reaching them.

Two related guides help you decide where the money should go:

• TikTok ads for service businesses covers when TikTok is worth testing alongside Meta, how its lead generation works, and the creative it needs.
• Should you do SEO or ads? explains what each one does, when to start with which, and how they make each other cheaper.

Ads stop the day you stop paying. That is not a flaw; it is the trade you make for speed. Most established businesses do best treating ads as the fast, controllable source of enquiries while search and AI visibility build something that keeps working without a daily budget. If you want to see how that second half works, the guide to getting enquiries from Google is the place to start.

A checklist to run against your own account

Work through these in order. Each one is a common reason ads get attention but no enquiries, and the early ones make the later ones pointless if they fail.

1. Objective. Is every campaign meant to bring enquiries set to Leads, or to Sales with an enquiry as the conversion? Turn off or rebuild anything on Engagement or Traffic that is meant to bring work.
2. Tracking. Does a single Lead event arrive in Events Manager when, and only when, an enquiry is submitted? Is it sent by both the Pixel and the Conversions API, with matching event IDs?
3. Other contact routes. Are phone taps and messaging buttons tracked, or at least counted somewhere, so you know their share of enquiries?
4. Lead handling. If you use instant forms, do new leads reach your inbox or CRM within minutes, and does someone call them back the same day?
5. Destination. Does each ad link to a page about that specific service, which repeats the ad's offer on the first screen and loads quickly on a phone?
6. Creative. Does the ad show your real work or your real people, name the area, and make one clear offer?
7. Location. Is the audience limited to the area you genuinely serve?
8. Measurement. Do you know your cost per genuine lead and your cost per job won for the last three months, and the ceiling each must stay under?

If you would rather have someone go through this with you, the M/AFZAL Visibility Audit includes a review of your current ads alongside your Google rankings, AI visibility and website: what is working, what is wasted, and a ranked list of fixes you keep. If the answer is that your current agency is the problem, the guide to signs your agency is not working will help you tell.