House Painting Meta Ads: 151 Leads at $59 CPL and 28 Booked Estimates

The campaign answered the question it was funded to answer: $8,860 bought 151 residential painting inquiries at $58.68 each across Los Angeles and Orange County, and 28 of them were booked into an on-site estimate at $208.89 of ad spend apiece. What the same data also shows is that almost none of that was decided by the size of the budget.
Three things drove it.
The cost per lead was made in the creative. The $58.68 average hides a five-fold spread between weeks. Week two ran $80 a lead on $2,147. Two weeks later the same account bought 36 leads at $33 on $1,170 - the best week of the campaign and the highest click volume of the whole period, on a smaller budget. Nothing structural changed except which video was carrying the spend. And because the report has no ad-level breakdown, identifying the video that earned the $33 week is exactly what the next test has to be built to answer.
The cheapest week was not the best week. January 19-25 delivered leads at $33 and booked 11% of them. January 5-11 delivered leads at $80 - the worst cost per lead of the flight - and booked 48%, thirteen estimates at $165 each, the cheapest booked appointments in the entire report. A team optimising on cost per lead alone would have switched off the better half of the account. The booking column is the one that should be steering the budget, and it exists for flight one only.
Stopping costs more than running. Flight one delivered leads at $49.57. After a five-week pause, the same offer and the same vertical videos delivered them at $91.24 - 84% more - and flight two never got back to flight one’s volume. Whatever the account had learned about who to show the ads to had to be re-bought at full price. At this budget level a smaller continuous spend is worth more than a bigger stop-start one.
And the honest limit of this report: it measures acquisition, not revenue. Spend, impressions, clicks, leads, cost per lead and booking status are all recorded, and so is the value of the estimates the sales team wrote - 40 of them, $924,795 quoted, the largest single bid at $237,000. Closed-won revenue is not recorded anywhere. So this case can prove what a painting lead costs in Los Angeles and what share of those leads reach an estimate. It cannot prove what any of them were signed for. The next version of this campaign is not a bigger budget - it is ad-level reporting so the $33 week can be repeated, one continuous flight instead of a stop-start pair, and closed-won revenue in the workbook so the next $9,000 can be judged on signed jobs instead of booked slots.