THE SHORT ANSWER
For solar panel installers, Meta ads costs EUR 30 to EUR 375 per enquiry and works out at EUR 90 to EUR 1,875 per signed job once you allow for 3 to 5 enquiries per customer. Viable for solar panel installers if you have a genuine offer and someone to filter the enquiries, not just a lead form.
Channel advice written for contractors in general is worth roughly what it costs, because the economics change completely between trades. This page runs Meta ads specifically for solar panel installers: the modelled cost, the volume ceiling, the skill it demands, and a plain verdict at the end.
The relevant economics for this trade: a typical project is worth EUR 7,000 to EUR 14,000, the buyer is a homeowner comparing three quotes for a roof-mounted system, demand peaks spring and early summer and bottoms out in November to January, and it takes 3 to 5 genuine enquiries to sign one customer.
The numbers, at a glance
Modelled cost per enquiry: EUR 30 to EUR 375, from clicks at EUR 1.08 to EUR 4.50 converting at 1.2 to 3.5 percent
Modelled cost per signed job: EUR 90 to EUR 1,875, once you allow for 3 to 5 enquiries per customer
Time to first enquiry: days, but the learning phase eats the first two weeks from a standing start
Verdict for solar panel installers: Viable for solar panel installers if you have a genuine offer and someone to filter the enquiries, not just a lead form.
How Meta ads behaves in this trade
Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) produces enquiries whose intent 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 constraint nobody mentions in the sales pitch: around 50 conversions a week per ad set for the delivery system to optimise properly, which most contractors never reach. For a solar panel business working a single metro, that is the thing to check before anything else.
Against that, the cost of being wrong. 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 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.
How a solar enquiry behaves before you ever speak to it
By the time a homeowner submits a solar form they have usually spent six to ten weeks reading, run at least one payback calculator and settled on a rough system size in kilowatt peak. The first call is an audit rather than an education. The installers who win are the ones who can confirm or correct the homeowner's own figures inside two minutes, because those figures are already written down on a kitchen table somewhere. Arriving with a generic benefits pitch signals that you did not read what they sent.
The offer and creative that work for solar on social
Solar is one of the few trades where paid social genuinely produces work, because the product is visible, the saving is quantifiable and the household is already primed by energy prices. The offer has to be a calculation, not a discount.
Offer: a personalised generation and payback estimate produced from a photograph of the roof and a recent bill figure, delivered the same day
Creative that works: aerial footage of a completed array on recognisable local housing stock, with the annual generation figure on screen in the first two seconds
Creative that fails: stock photography of panels against a blue sky, and any unqualified savings claim, which also draws policy review
Qualifier to build into the form: ownership and roof age, because those two answers remove the largest share of unworkable enquiries in this trade
What the solar site visit has to establish
Roof pitch and orientation are the obvious items, but the visits that go wrong go wrong at the consumer unit. Available fuse ways, main fuse rating, earthing arrangement and the cable run from array to inverter all change the price, and none of them are visible from a satellite image. A remote quote later revised upward for board work is the fastest way to lose a signed job in this trade. Price the electrical side on site or price it conservatively up front, and say which you have done.
The arithmetic, with every assumption visible
Every step for solar panel 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 4.50 for solar panel 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 375, 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 1,875.
Against a midpoint project of EUR 10,500, the worst-case figure of EUR 1,875 is 17.9 percent of contract value. Whether that is acceptable depends entirely on your gross margin, not on your revenue, and that is the calculation most contractors skip.
The measurement that stops a channel from flattering itself
Track cost per qualified enquiry rather than cost per form fill. A channel that halves your cost per submission while doubling the unqualified share has made you poorer, and a dashboard measuring the wrong thing will report it as an improvement.
For solar panel work the qualification standard is roof orientation, roof age, ownership, annual consumption and timeline. Write those fields into the form, into the supplier specification and into the weekly report, and the comparison between channels becomes honest for the first time.
At zero intent, the offer is the campaign
Nobody opens a social app intending to commission building work, so something in the ad has to manufacture a reason to act now: a free survey, a fixed price starting point, a limited installation window, a specific current trigger. Generic brand creative in a home improvement trade produces impressions and no enquiries, and the usual response is to widen the audience, which makes it worse.
Before you spend anything on Meta ads
Write down your own gross margin percentage on a typical solar panel job, not your revenue.
Compare your maximum per enquiry against the EUR 30 to EUR 375 per enquiry modelled above. If your ceiling is lower, fix conversion or job value before you touch the channel.
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.
Check that a page exists for solar panel specifically, rather than a homepage listing every service you offer.
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. Channel figures on this page carry a second layer of modelling on top of the lead-price band, since click cost and conversion rate both vary by market as well as by trade. Treat the spread as the important part rather than either end of it.
How Flock Leads prices this
For comparison, this is what exclusive solar panel enquiries cost outright, with no retainer and no contract term:
Starter - 10 leads for EUR 750, which is EUR 75 per lead
Growth - 25 leads for EUR 1,750, which is EUR 70 per lead
Scale - 45 leads for EUR 2,925, which is EUR 65 per lead
Pro - 70 leads for EUR 4,340, which is EUR 62 per lead
Max - 90 leads for EUR 5,400, which is EUR 60 per lead
No retainer, no contract term, and no lead sent to a second business. Unused volume rolls over under the Flock Lead Promise.
Want leads like this in your pipeline?
Flock runs the campaigns, screens the enquiries and hands you only the ones that match your service area, job size and capacity. You pay per lead, not per month.
Book a 15-minute fit check | See lead package pricing
Related answers
Frequently asked questions
How much should a solar panel business budget for Meta ads?
Work backwards from a signed job rather than forwards from a budget. At EUR 90 to EUR 1,875 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 solar panel 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.
What is the single biggest mistake in Meta ads for this trade?
Sending traffic to a homepage instead of a page built for solar panel alone. It typically halves the conversion rate, which doubles the cost per enquiry, and no amount of bid management recovers that.
What should a solar panel enquiry contain before it is worth quoting?
At minimum roof orientation, roof age, ownership, annual consumption and timeline. Those answers are what separate an enquiry from a phone number, and collecting them at the point of enquiry rather than on the call removes most of the wasted quoting time in this trade.
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