# Facebook Ads for Foundation Repair: 60% of Your Competitors Are There. Only 14% Are on Google.

> We checked 6,932 foundation and basement companies: four times as many run Meta ads as Google ads. When that works for foundation repair, and when it doesn't.

Canonical: https://webnwell.com/blog/facebook-ads-for-foundation-repair/


We checked every company in our study — 6,932 foundation repair, basement waterproofing and crawl-space businesses across the US and Canada — for live advertising on Google and on Meta.

**4,158 of them were running Meta ads. Only 1,005 were running Google ads.**

That is 60% on Facebook and Instagram against 14.5% on Google. Four to one. When we first ran that query we assumed something had broken in the script, because it is the opposite of what the economics of this trade suggest. It had not broken. Foundation repair, as a trade, has quietly moved most of its advertising money to the platform where nobody is looking for a foundation repair company.

This article is about why that happened, when Facebook does work for this trade, and how to tell which situation you are in before you spend another month funding the wrong one.


## The one difference that decides everything

A homeowner types *foundation repair near me* into Google at the moment they have decided they have a problem. Maybe they just found a crack that runs the height of the basement wall. Maybe a home inspection came back and the sale is now conditional. They are looking for you, right now, and the only question is which company answers first.

That is **intent**, and it is the entire reason search advertising costs what it does.

On Facebook, nobody is looking for you. They are looking at their nephew's wedding photos. Your ad interrupts that. The best foundation repair ad in the world, shown to somebody with a perfectly dry basement, produces nothing — and you paid for it.

This is not a criticism of Meta. It is a description of what each platform is for. Search captures demand that already exists. Social creates demand that does not yet exist, or reaches people who have a problem but have not decided to act on it.

Foundation repair is overwhelmingly a **demand-capture** trade. Nobody wakes up wanting a $12,000 pier installation. They want it because water came in, or a wall moved, or a buyer's inspector wrote a paragraph that killed their sale. The trigger comes first. The search follows.

So when 60% of the trade advertises where there is no intent and 14.5% advertises where all of it is, something other than economics is driving the decision.


## Why the trade drifted to Facebook anyway

Four reasons, and none of them are stupid.

**It is cheaper per click, and that feels like winning.** A foundation repair click on Google can run $15 to $40 in a competitive metro. The same money buys a great many more clicks on Facebook. If you are measuring clicks, Facebook wins every time. If you are measuring signed jobs, the comparison inverts, and most contractors have no way to see that because the tracking was never set up. In our study, **63% of these companies' websites carry no structured data at all** and a large share have no working call tracking — so the phone rings and nobody can say which ad caused it.

**The boosted-post trap.** Facebook puts a Boost button under every post you publish. It takes one tap and no expertise. Google Ads makes you build a campaign, choose keywords, write ads to character limits and set up conversion tracking before anything runs. Given one easy path and one hard path, a busy owner takes the easy one — and it becomes "our advertising".

**The photos are good.** Foundation work is visual: the before, the crack, the piers going in, the finished basement. That content performs on Facebook, and the engagement feels like progress. Likes are not leads, but they arrive faster and feel better.

**Somebody's cousin runs it for $300 a month.** Search advertising has a real floor of expertise below which it loses money reliably. Social has no floor — you can always spend the budget on something. Cheap management can keep a Facebook account busy indefinitely without ever producing a signed job.

## What 1,005 companies on Google tells you

Here is the number worth sitting with. **Only 14.5% of an entire trade is bidding on the searches their customers are typing.**

If you are in a metro of thirty foundation companies, roughly four of them are on Google. The other twenty-six are either on Facebook, or advertising nowhere, or buying shared leads from Angi and Networx — which is the same demand, resold to you at a markup after three competitors got the same phone number.

That is not a crowded auction. It is an open lane in the one place where every high-intent homeowner starts.

And it gets better, because of what we found on the other side. Among the same companies, **22% of live websites give a visitor no way to make contact from the homepage** — no form, no email link. **24% load slowly enough to lose visitors before the page appears.** And **one in eleven listed websites is dead entirely.** So of the competitors who *are* advertising, a meaningful share are paying for clicks that land on a page which cannot convert them.


## When Facebook earns its place

None of the above means never use Meta. It means stop using it as your primary demand source. There are four situations where it works for this trade.

**Retargeting.** Somebody visited your site, read the pier page, did not call. Following them on Facebook for the next two weeks is cheap and it works, because the intent already happened. You are staying visible while they get two other quotes and talk to their spouse. This is the best use of Meta money in foundation repair, and almost nobody does it, because it requires a pixel and an audience rather than a Boost button.

**Storm and seasonal response.** After heavy rain across a metro, a lot of basements take water at once, and a large share of those homeowners have not yet started searching. A geographically tight campaign in the days after a weather event reaches a real problem before it becomes a Google search. This is the one case where Meta reaches a real problem rather than interrupting an unrelated one.

**Proof at scale.** Before-and-after work, an owner explaining what a bowing wall means for the house, a timelapse of a pier install. This content builds the familiarity that makes your name the one they recognise later. Treat it as brand, measure it as brand, and do not expect it to produce inbound calls this week.

**Hiring.** Crews are harder to find than customers in this trade. Facebook is a strong recruiting channel and costs a fraction of a job board.

What Facebook is not good at, for foundation repair, is cold lead generation from interest targeting. "Homeowners aged 35–65 interested in home improvement" is not a group with foundation problems. It is a group with houses.

## How to tell which situation you are in

Three questions. You can answer all of them this week.

**1. Can you name the last five jobs and the channel each came from?** Not leads. Signed jobs. If you cannot, you do not have an advertising problem, you have a measurement problem, and every other decision here is guesswork until it is fixed. Call tracking and conversion tracking are a one-time setup and they make every subsequent decision obvious.

**2. What does a signed job cost you on each channel?** Take one channel's spend for a quarter, divide by jobs signed from it. A $40 Google click that closes one job in twenty is an $800 acquisition cost on a $9,000 job. A $2 Facebook click that closes one in four hundred costs the same $800, but you will rarely know, because the four hundred clicks felt like traction.

**3. Are you on Google at all?** If you are in the 85.5% that is not, and your competitors mostly are not either, that is the first move. Not because search is fashionable, but because it is where people who need you today are, and the lane is emptier than it has any right to be.

## The order we would actually do it in

If you are running Facebook ads today and nothing on Google, here is the sequence we would use, and it does not start with turning anything off.

**First, fix the measurement.** Call tracking, form tracking, and both wired to whatever you are running. Without this, the next two steps are opinions.

**Second, put a floor of budget on search.** Your own brand name, your core services, your real service area, tight negative keywords so you are not paying for people researching DIY crack filler. Keep it small and honest until the numbers come in.

**Third, move Meta to the jobs it is good at.** Retargeting the people search sends you, storm response, proof content, recruiting. That is usually less money than you are spending today, and considerably more useful.

Then compare cost per signed job after one quarter, and let the numbers decide the split. They usually settle around a heavy majority on search with a small persistent retargeting budget. But your market is your market, and the point of measuring is that you no longer have to take our word for it.

## Where your own company sits

Every figure in this article comes from our own audit of 6,932 foundation and basement companies — the same dataset behind [State of Foundation Repair Websites 2026](/state-of-foundation-websites-2026/).

You can look yourself up. Our [website scorecard](/score/) shows where you rank on reviews in your state, how many competitors in your market are running ads right now, and how your site scored — no email needed to see the market picture.

And if you want the full version, the [free foundation marketing audit](/foundation-basement-marketing/#free-audit) covers your ads engine, your whole web presence and your local competitors ranked, as a 15-minute video walkthrough with the three fixes worth doing first. It arrives within 48 hours and is yours whether or not we ever speak.