THE SHORT ANSWER
For heat pump installers, Meta ads costs EUR 30 to EUR 350 per enquiry and works out at EUR 90 to EUR 1,750 per signed job once you allow for 3 to 5 enquiries per customer. Not recommended as a primary channel for heat pump installers. The purchase is technical, expensive and slow, and paying cold-traffic prices to educate a household that had not been thinking about it is the most expensive order in which to do this.
A channel that is a bargain for one trade is a money pit for the next one along, and the difference is arithmetic rather than opinion. What follows is Meta ads applied to one trade only, heat pump installers: what it costs per enquiry and per signed job, where the ceiling sits, what it demands of you, and an unhedged answer at the end.
The numbers that govern the decision: projects run EUR 9,000 to EUR 18,000, the buyer is typically a homeowner replacing a gas or oil boiler, demand peaks September to January and falls away in June and July, and 3 to 5 genuine enquiries are needed for each customer signed.
The numbers, at a glance
What one enquiry costs: EUR 30 to EUR 350, being clicks at EUR 1.08 to EUR 4.20 against a landing page converting at 1.2 to 3.5 percent
What one signed job costs: EUR 90 to EUR 1,750, after allowing 3 to 5 enquiries for every customer signed
Time from a standing start to the first enquiry: days, but the learning phase eats the first two weeks, assuming you begin with nothing in place
Straight answer for heat pump installers: Not recommended as a primary channel for heat pump installers. The purchase is technical, expensive and slow, and paying cold-traffic prices to educate a household that had not been thinking about it is the most expensive order in which to do this.
The shape of Meta ads for this trade
Intent on Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) is low at the moment of the click and manufactured by the offer, because nobody opened the app to buy a heat pump. Clicks are a fraction of search prices, and you can reach people who have not started looking yet.
The limit that rarely appears in a sales conversation: around 50 conversions a week per ad set for the delivery system to optimise properly, which most contractors never reach. For a heat pump business covering one metro, check that before anything else, because a channel you cannot feed will underperform its own benchmarks indefinitely.
The downside is worth stating plainly. Enquiry quality is markedly lower and the volume of unqualified contacts will occupy someone's whole morning unless you filter hard. Skill required: Creative is the whole job. The targeting is largely automated now; the difference between a working and a failing account is the offer and the first three seconds of the video.
The arithmetic, with every assumption visible
Every step for heat pump is set out below with its assumption stated, so you can replace any of them with your own figures.
Click cost: EUR 1.08 to EUR 4.20 for heat pump keywords, which tracks job value rather than competition alone.
Landing page conversion: 1.2 to 3.5 percent of clicks become an enquiry, assuming a page built for one trade rather than a homepage.
Cost per enquiry: EUR 30 to EUR 350, which is click cost divided by conversion rate.
Enquiries per customer: 3 to 5 for this trade, because not everyone answers, quotes or proceeds.
Cost per signed job: EUR 90 to EUR 1,750.
Set the worst case of EUR 1,750 against a midpoint project of EUR 13,500 and acquisition is 13.0 percent of the contract. Whether that works is a question about your gross margin rather than your turnover, which is the step almost everybody omits.
Your dashboard and your diary will disagree, and the diary is right
Platform attribution counts view-through and click windows that generously assign credit to itself. A contractor comparing reported leads against the enquiries their office actually logged will find a gap. The workable discipline is to treat platform numbers as a relative signal for comparing one creative against another, and to judge the channel as a whole on enquiries recorded in your own system.
The technical objection that decides heat pump deals
Almost every serious heat pump conversation ends in the same place: will the house actually be warm. Homeowners have read that these systems run at lower flow temperatures and they have heard a story about a cold living room. The answer is a room-by-room heat loss calculation and an honest emitter schedule naming the rooms that need larger radiators. Installers who quote from floor area alone get undercut by installers who quote from a calculation, then beaten again when the cheap quote is revised on site.
The learning phase punishes small budgets split many ways
Delivery needs a run of conversions per ad set before it stabilises. Splitting a modest budget across five ad sets guarantees none of them reach it, and every edit restarts the process. Fewer ad sets, larger budgets each, and a rule against touching a campaign for the first week or two are worth more than any targeting refinement available in the interface.
The landing page decides half your cost per enquiry
A page built for heat pump work alone will convert at roughly double the rate of a homepage carrying every service you offer. Since cost per enquiry is click cost divided by conversion rate, that single change halves the figure without touching the budget.
It is also why two businesses in the same trade report costs that differ by a factor of two from the same auction. The difference is almost never the targeting. It is what happens in the thirty seconds after the click.
The offer and creative that work for heat pumps on social
This is the hardest trade in the set for interruption advertising, because you are funding public education at cold-traffic prices. If you run it at all, run it as a two-step with a substantial retargeting layer rather than as a direct lead campaign.
Offer: a running cost comparison against the household's current heating bill, or a free room-by-room heat loss check, both of which give a reason to hand over real information
Creative that works: an installed outdoor unit on an ordinary house with the noise level stated on screen, and a homeowner saying what the house felt like in January
Creative that fails: subsidy-led messaging, which attracts households whose entire interest is the funding and who disappear when it does not apply
Expect a long lag: enquiries from this channel take weeks to reach a survey, so any read inside a month will condemn a campaign that is actually working
What triggers a heat pump enquiry and how urgent it really is
Two events produce most heat pump enquiries: a boiler that has just failed, and an engineer who has said the current one will not see another winter. Both feel urgent and both then slow down, because an energy assessment, grant paperwork and a radiator schedule sit between the enquiry and the deposit. The mistake is reading the initial urgency as a short sales cycle. Book the survey quickly to hold the position, then manage a four to ten week process without letting the file go quiet.
Work through this before committing to Meta ads
Multiply that gross margin by the share you are willing to spend on acquisition, usually 10 to 20 percent, to get your ceiling per signed customer.
Divide your maximum acquisition cost per customer by 3 to 5, the enquiries this trade needs to sign one, and you have the most you can pay for a single enquiry.
Name the person responsible for the first call attempt and the target time. Every number on this page assumes contact inside minutes rather than hours.
Make sure there is a page about heat pump alone before you send anyone to it. A homepage covering everything roughly halves what follows.
How these figures were built
These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote.
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Frequently asked questions
How much should a heat pump business budget for Meta ads?
Work backwards from a signed job rather than forwards from a budget. At EUR 90 to EUR 1,750 per job and a typical target of one to two jobs a week, the monthly figure follows arithmetically. Setting a round number first and hoping it produces work is the most common and most expensive mistake in this channel.
How long before Meta ads produces a signed job?
First enquiries take days, but the learning phase eats the first two weeks. A signed job takes that plus your own sales cycle, which for heat pump work runs from a few days on urgent jobs to several months on planned ones. Judge the channel on cost per qualified enquiry early and on cost per signed job only after a full cycle has completed.
Should heat pump installers use this channel or a different one?
Not recommended as a primary channel for heat pump installers. The purchase is technical, expensive and slow, and paying cold-traffic prices to educate a household that had not been thinking about it is the most expensive order in which to do this. The wider point is that these are not competing options. Local search is the long-term asset, purchased leads cover the gap while it matures, and paid advertising is the accelerator you switch on once you know your numbers well enough to calculate what a click is worth.
Does seasonality change the answer for heat pump installers?
Materially. Demand peaks September to January and troughs in June and July, driven by boiler replacement deadlines and running-cost comparisons. Paid channels follow that curve and get more expensive at the top of it; local search ignores it; purchased volume can be aimed deliberately at the trough, when fewer competitors are bidding for the same households.
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