Facebook and Instagram ads for waterproofing companies: the video that works, the offer, the budget, retargeting
What Meta ads do for a waterproofing company: the job-site video that works, a free inspection offer, realistic budgets and retargeting after a storm.
Nobody scrolls Facebook hoping to find a crawl space encapsulation company. That is the first thing to accept about Meta ads in this trade. Google catches the homeowner at the moment of the problem. Meta catches her two weeks later, on the couch, after the basement has dried out and the worry has not. Run it for what it is good at and it is the second cheapest inspection source most waterproofing companies have.
What Meta is good at here
Three jobs. First, a free inspection offer to homeowners in your towns who own the kind of house that floods: built before 1980, basement or crawl space, on a lot that slopes the wrong way. Meta cannot target "has a wet basement," but it can target zip codes and age of home well enough. Second, retargeting everyone who visited your site after a storm and did not book. Third, keeping your name familiar between storms so the Google search in April lands on you.
Leads run $25 to $70 in most markets. That is cheaper than a $90 to $250 Google call and noticeably softer. A Meta lead closes at about half the rate of a search call, and only if someone calls it within five minutes.
The creative that holds up
Phone video from the job. Not a designed graphic, not a stock photo of a smiling family, not the logo spinning. The homeowner is scrolling past vacation photos; a trench being cut in a basement floor stops the thumb.
Five clips every crew can shoot and that work as ads:
- A water test. Hose on the exterior wall, camera inside watching the seam. Nothing explains the problem faster.
- A crawl space before and after. Dirt, mold on the joists, standing water. Then the white liner, the dehumidifier, the clean lights. Fifteen seconds each side.
- The sump pit with the float cycling and the discharge running outside.
- The inspector saying one sentence at the camera: "This crack is on the cold joint, it is a $700 fix, not a $7,000 one."
- The finished interior drain system with the floor patched and the basement clean.
Thirty to forty-five seconds, captions burned in because most people watch with sound off, the town named in the first line of the text. One clear line: "Free basement inspection in Toledo this week. Written quote, no pressure."
The offer
A free inspection is the right offer because it is already what you do and it costs the homeowner nothing to say yes. Do not discount the job in the ad. "$500 off interior systems" trains your market to wait for coupons and attracts the shopper who will take four quotes.
Use a lead form inside Meta with four questions: town, type of problem (water on the floor, cracks, musty crawl space, bowing wall), how urgent, and phone. The questions do two things: they filter out the person who clicked by accident, and they let whoever calls back open with the problem instead of "I see you filled out a form."
Budget
$25 a day, one offer, one service area. At about $750 a month expect 12 to 30 leads depending on season and market, more after a heavy rain. Do not split $25 across three offers and two metros; the algorithm needs volume in one place to learn. Scale by adding days of budget to the one ad that is working, not by adding ads.
Retargeting is cheap and should run always: $5 to $10 a day against site visitors from the last 30 days and anyone who watched half of a video. After a storm the site visitor pool spikes and the retargeting ad is the one that books the inspection a week later.
Timing around weather
Meta lets you turn campaigns on and off in a minute, which Google does not. The morning after a two-inch rain, double the daily budget on the inspection offer for three days. The week before spring thaw, run the crawl space and battery backup ads. In February, run "we are booking exterior excavation for April, deposit holds your date." The seasonality guide has the full calendar.
Follow-up is the whole result
A Meta lead that is called inside five minutes behaves like a decent search call. The same lead called the next afternoon is worth nothing; the homeowner has forgotten clicking. Wire the form to text you and the homeowner immediately: "Hi, this is Dan from the inspection ad, I can be out Thursday at 10 or Friday at 2, which works?" Then call within five minutes. If you cannot do that reliably, run the retargeting and skip the lead form until you can. The follow-up guide covers the sequence.
What two weeks looks like
By day 14 with one offer at $25 a day: a few hundred video views, 8 to 15 leads, three to six inspections booked, and a cost per booked inspection you can put beside Google's. The number that tells you whether to continue is cost per booked inspection, not cost per lead. A $30 lead nobody can reach is more expensive than a $90 call that books.
Frequently asked
Should I boost posts instead? No. Boosting optimizes for likes and comments, and likes do not book inspections. Run the same video as a lead or traffic campaign with the inspection form attached.
Does Instagram work for this trade? The same ads run on both automatically. Most of the results come from Facebook, where the owner of a 1962 basement spends her time. Leave Instagram on; it costs nothing extra.
Will Meta work in a small town? Yes, often better, because the audience is small and the same people see your crawl space video three times in a month. Keep the budget low and the radius tight.
Meta ads are one of the services in the free 14-day trial, no card, text or call. See the free trial page.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, waterproofing companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor