You've probably heard both versions of this story. One solar company says Facebook ads filled their calendar. Another says they paid for 200 leads and couldn't get ten of them on the phone. Both are telling it straight, and most of the time they ran two different kinds of campaign.
I sold 250+ residential solar deals as a rep before I ran marketing. Since then we've managed $500K+ in solar ad spend across Facebook and Google and generated 25,000+ homeowner leads for 50+ solar companies. This is what I'd tell a friend who's about to put money into Facebook.
Do Facebook ads work for solar companies?
Yes, as long as the campaign is built to produce appointments and you judge it on appointments. Facebook and Instagram put your offer in front of homeowners in the exact areas you install in.
The catch is that nobody opens Facebook to shop for solar. On Google the homeowner searched for you. On Facebook you interrupted them, so the ad and the page behind it have to sort the curious from the serious before your rep ever dials. Campaigns that skip the sorting are the ones people complain about.
Should you use Facebook instant forms or a landing page?
Use a landing page with a few questions on it if your reps' time is worth anything. Instant forms are cheaper per lead and more expensive per sale.
An instant form opens inside Facebook with the person's name, phone and email already filled in. Two taps and they're a lead. We've seen those come in at $3 or $4 each. The trouble is that contact rates run around 5%. Buy 100 leads at $4 and you've spent $400 to have five conversations, which is $80 per conversation before anyone has agreed to anything.
There's a second cost that never shows up in the ad account. The other 95 leads still get dialed, and all those unanswered calls hurt your phone number's reputation. Once a number starts getting flagged as spam, even your good leads stop picking up.
What we run for most solar companies is a calculator funnel. The ad offers to show a homeowner how many panels their home would need. They click through to a page, answer a few questions, and leave their contact details at the end to see the result. A new campaign like that usually runs $18 to $25 per lead depending on the area, and some markets come in lower.
| Instant form | Calculator funnel | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cost per lead | $3 to $4 | $18 to $25 on a new campaign |
| What the homeowner did | Tapped twice | Answered questions about their own home |
| When you call | Around 5% pick up | They remember asking and expect the call |
| What you know before dialing | Name and number | Owner or renter, power bill, roof |
The full cost math, down to what it works out to per appointment, is in how much solar leads cost.
What questions should a solar funnel ask?
Three: do they own the home, what's their power bill, and what shape is the roof in. Those are the same three things I needed to know as a rep before a drive was worth making.
Renters can't buy. A homeowner with a tiny power bill has nothing to save. A roof that needs replacing soon turns your solar pitch into a roofing conversation. Asking up front costs you a few leads, and every one of those was going to waste an evening for one of your closers.
What does a good solar Facebook ad look like?
It says who it's for, promises one specific piece of information, and looks like something a real person posted.
Here's a solar Facebook ads example in words. The image is a plain photo of an ordinary house with panels on the roof, shot from the street on a phone. The headline reads "How many solar panels would your home need?" The text above it is two lines. It names the area you serve, says it's for homeowners, and tells them they can answer a few questions to see their number. No exclamation points and no countdown timer.
A second version that holds up well is a short phone video of someone standing in front of a finished install, saying who they are, what area they work in, and what the homeowner will find out if they click.
What I'd stay away from:
- Stock art of a smiling family on a lawn. People scroll past it because it looks like an ad.
- "Free solar" or anything that sounds like a government program. It attracts people who expect something for nothing, and it's the kind of claim that gets ad accounts in trouble.
- A list of everything your company does. One promise per ad.
Both of those examples offer the homeowner one small next step and leave the selling to the page and the phone call.
How much should a solar company spend on Facebook ads?
Enough to get a real read, and for us that starts around $1,000 a month in ad spend. That's the smallest budget we run.
Here's the arithmetic. At $18 to $25 per lead, $1,000 buys roughly 40 to 55 leads. About 15% of leads book an appointment, so that's six to eight on the calendar. About 65% of virtual and 80% of in-person appointments show, which leaves you four to six conversations with qualified homeowners. Our most recent solar campaign worked out to just under $200 per appointment that showed. That's a past result, and your market will land somewhere else.
For a single consultant that's a workable month. A company with several closers should size the budget to the number of appointments the team can run. We've managed solar campaigns past $3,000 a day across Meta, Google, YouTube and TikTok, so your sales capacity will cap you long before the platform does.
Give a new campaign more than a month before you judge it. The booking rate tends to climb toward 20% once the campaign has enough booked appointments to optimize for them.
What should you track every week?
Booked appointments and appointments that showed, and what each one cost. Cost per lead is a weak signal when you look at it alone.
The instant form campaign above wins on cost per lead every single week and loses on everything that pays a commission. Cheap can work, though. One installer we ran ads for got 10,000+ leads at under $13 each across several states, and at that volume a lower cost per lead is worth having, as long as every lead gets worked right away.
So the weekly check is short. How many leads came in, how many got a call and a text within minutes, how many booked, how many showed. If shows are the weak spot, the fix is usually in the follow-up, which I've covered in how to cut solar appointment no-shows.
What does it cost to have someone run this for you?
It depends on who you hire, so I'll only speak for us. We charge a flat monthly fee that starts at $750, month to month, with no setup fee. Ad spend is separate. You pay it and we never mark it up.
A few things we don't do. We don't sell leads one at a time or charge per appointment. We don't guarantee a number of leads or deals, because results depend on your market, your price and your budget. And we only do residential solar, so I'm the wrong person to ask about commercial.
The fee covers the ads, the funnel and the follow-up. Every lead gets a call and a text within minutes from Summer, our virtual assistant, and she either books them on your calendar or transfers them to you live. The leads are yours alone and never resold.
If you want to see what this would look like in your area, book a 15-minute call and I'll walk you through it.