Almost every service business has a story about Facebook leads being worthless. The complaint is usually accurate and the diagnosis is usually wrong. Four things cause it, and all four are fixable.
The lead never declared intent
A search lead typed the problem. A Facebook lead was looking at photos of someone's holiday thirty seconds before filling in your form. Both are called leads, and they behave nothing alike.
Treating them identically is the root of the problem. Social leads need faster contact, more attempts, and a lower expectation per enquiry, offset by costing a fraction as much.
Nobody called them fast enough
This is the biggest single factor and it sits entirely on your side. A lead contacted within minutes converts at a completely different rate to one contacted the following afternoon, by which point they have forgotten filling in anything.
We ask about response process before recommending lead forms. If enquiries are checked once a day, we will send traffic to a landing page instead and accept lower volume for better-qualified people.
The form was too easy
Prefilled forms are frictionless by design, which is exactly why they collect people who were not really thinking about it. Adding one or two qualifying questions cuts volume noticeably and raises quality more.
Which side of that trade you want depends on your actual problem. Too few enquiries and too many bad ones need opposite adjustments, and it is worth being honest about which one you have.
The campaign optimised toward the wrong thing
Tell Meta that a form submission is the goal and it will find the people most likely to submit forms. That is not the same population as people likely to buy, and the gap widens as the campaign optimises.
The correction is feeding real outcomes back in, so the system learns what a good customer looks like rather than what a keen form-filler looks like. It needs your close data, which is the part clients most often skip.
What good looks like
A working Facebook campaign for a local service business produces enquiries at a fraction of search cost, converting at a lower rate, contacted within minutes, with quality feedback flowing back weekly. The blended cost per customer lands below what search alone would achieve.
When those conditions are not in place, we will tell you before taking the budget, because this is the channel where the client's own process decides the outcome more than ours does.