Painting Contractor Facebook Ads Case Study: $44,781 in Ads, $1.13M in Sales (25x ROAS)

The results: $1.13M in sales from $44,781 in ads

We launched Konrad's Meta ads on January 28, 2026. By October 19 his team had signed 80 jobs from leads we generated, adding up to $1,131,074 in sales. Every number below comes straight from Pulse, the dashboard we use to track every lead for every client from the first click to the signed contract.

For context: most contractors who run their own ads, or work with a generalist agency, never see this view at all. They see clicks and cost per lead. Konrad sees exactly how many dollars of signed work came back for every dollar he spent, broken down by month, by ad and by service.

Month by month: what consistency looks like

The million didn't come from one lucky month. Seven of the eight full months came in above $100,000 in sales, with ad spend held at about $3,200 to $6,500 a month.

The lesson is in March. Sales dropped to $36,433 (7.3x ROAS) as the early backlog of estimates worked through. A lot of owners would have panicked and paused right there. Konrad kept the ads running, and April came in at $162,908 (35.9x). With the typical lead taking about 8 days to sign (and plenty taking much longer), a single month is a noisy scoreboard. Judge your contractor marketing over a full quarter.

The funnel math every contractor should know

Here's how 403 leads turned into $1.13M. If you run a painting or home-improvement business, these are the five numbers to track every week:

1. Cost per lead: $111.12. Not the cheapest you'll see, and that's fine. Cheap leads that don't answer the phone are the most expensive leads there are.
2. Appointment set rate: 62.8%. 253 of 403 leads booked an in-home estimate. This is where speed to lead and persistent follow-up pay off.
3. Cost per booked estimate: $177. Ask yourself what a sit-down estimate with a homeowner who asked for one is worth to your business.
4. Close rate: 31.6%. 80 of 253 estimates signed. Owner-led ads help here because the homeowner already feels they know who's coming.
5. Revenue per lead: about $2,807. This is the number that makes everything else make sense. At $111 a lead, each one brought back more than 25 times its cost.

The ads that drove the most sales

Every lead in Pulse carries the name of the ad it came from, so we can rank creative by signed revenue instead of clicks. These are Derheim Painting's top ads by sales from launch to date:

Three patterns stand out:

• Konrad's face is on almost every winner. The SIA format (an owner headshot next to a grid of real finished jobs) and the COV format (Konrad talking straight to camera) dominate the list. Homeowners hire people, not logos.
• Real jobs, zero stock. Every photo is a real Derheim project: real homes, real crew. No stock footage, no AI imagery.
• Service-specific creative wins big tickets. The two siding grids brought in only 15 leads between them, but 6 of those signed for $140,515. Narrow creative attracts homeowners with bigger projects.

Here's what those formats look like in his account today (current ads from the Meta Ad Library):

Static · grid

Static · grid

Static · team

Why owner-led video works for contractors

When a homeowner lets a painter into their house, they're trusting a person. An ad where the owner introduces himself pre-sells the estimate: by the time Konrad or his rep knocks on the door, the homeowner already feels like they know him.

It's also impossible for a competitor to copy. They can match your price. They can't match you. We break the format down step by step in our guide to owner-led Facebook ads for contractors.

Bigger jobs, bigger returns

Derheim Painting's average job is $14,138, and the median is about $10,000. But the real story is where the revenue comes from:

41 of the 80 jobs were $10,000 or more, and they made up 84% of all sales. The 22 jobs over $20,000 alone added up to $700,612, including one at $60,448. That's why we don't optimize contractor ads for the cheapest possible lead. One $25,000 exterior repaint pays for months of ad spend.

The service mix tells the same story:

Interior and exterior painting drove most of the volume, while cabinet refinishing and siding produced some of the highest revenue per lead. Running separate creative for each service lets the budget follow the money.

The playbook: 6 things any painting contractor can copy

1. Put the owner (or the rep who shows up) in the ads. A headshot next to a grid of real jobs, or a 20-second phone video saying who you are. That's the format behind most of Konrad's top ads.
2. Feed the machine real content. Fresh job photos, before and afters, and crew shots. Creative fatigue kills accounts; a steady stream of real content keeps the winners coming.
3. Call fast and follow up for days. A 62.8% appointment rate doesn't happen by accident. See our breakdown of speed to lead for contractors.
4. Price and sell for bigger projects. Run service-specific ads (siding, cabinets, full exteriors) and train your team to sell the whole job, not just the room that was asked about.
5. Stay consistent through the slow month. Konrad's 7.3x March was followed by a 35.9x April. Pausing would have broken the compounding.
6. Track every lead to the signed job. Kill ads that bring leads but no sales, and scale the ones that close, even if their cost per lead is higher. Here's how to track contractor marketing to the signed job.

What to look for in a contractor marketing agency

If you're comparing agencies for leads for contractors, ask every one of them these questions:

• Can you show me revenue, not just leads? If they can't tie ad spend to signed jobs, you'll never know your real ROAS.
• Who makes the creative, and is it real? Stock-photo ads attract price shoppers. Owner-led ads from your real jobs attract homeowners who value quality.
• Do you help with what happens after the lead? Leads are only half the job. Speed to lead, follow-up and sales coaching decide how many turn into money.
• Do you specialize in home-service contractors? Painting, cabinets, epoxy and remodeling buyers behave differently from e-commerce shoppers. Pick a team that lives in your industry.

That's how we run every account at Forward Media Marketing for the 200+ contractor businesses we've partnered with. Konrad's result is one of the best in our portfolio, and every client's market, offer and team are different. But the system behind it is the same one we use everywhere.

Frequently asked questions

About the data: all figures come from Pulse, Forward Media Marketing's lead-tracking dashboard, using event-date attribution (leads, appointments and sales counted on the date they happened). Headline totals cover January 28 to October 19, 2026. The monthly, ad, service and job-size tables come from the same Pulse data pulled October 20, 2026; some sales (about $240,000) came from FMM leads that couldn't be tied to one specific ad, so the ad table doesn't add up to the total. Ad examples are current ads from the Meta Ad Library in the same formats as the top performers. Results vary by market, offer and team.