Why does my cost per lead look great while nobody answers the phone?
Because of prefill. Meta populates the form from the profile information it already holds, so for most people the entire interaction is: tap the ad, tap submit. They never type anything. Often they never read anything. A meaningful share of them genuinely don't remember doing it, which is why they sound surprised when you ring. You aren't imagining that.
Here is what that looks like with real numbers. A Melbourne installer we spoke to has a coach running his lead form campaigns. Across two of them he picked up about forty six leads for roughly $723 in spend, which averages out to about $15.70 a lead. That's the kind of result an agency screenshots for its own ads.
Out of the forty six, there were six people he could actually reach and follow up with.
What did those leads actually cost?
Do the arithmetic with me, because the dashboard won't do it for you. It stops at the first line and the first line is the only flattering one.
- $723 spent, 46 leads collected.
That's $15.70 a lead, and it's the number on the report. If your average job is worth a few thousand dollars, $15.70 to meet an interested customer sounds like the deal of the decade.
- Six of the 46 pick up the phone.
The other forty don't answer, don't reply, and in a few cases don't remember submitting anything. So the $723 actually bought six conversations. That's about $120 per person you genuinely spoke to.
- Say one of the six books a job.
Now the campaign cost $723 per job won. Perfectly fine if the job is a bathroom. Brutal if it's a $250 call-out. Notice how far we already are from $15.70.
- Say none of them book.
Then the spend bought nothing at all. $723 gone, plus whatever you paid the person running the ads, for zero jobs. This is the exact point where most people conclude that ads don't work, and the ads were never the problem. The form settings were.
Is there an autofill switch I can turn off?
Sort of, and this deserves a straight answer, because the advice gets given as turn off autofill, half the people who go looking for the toggle can't find it, and everyone walks away confused.
For most of the time lead forms have existed, there was no such setting. Meta prefilled from profile data wherever it held it and that was that. Then Meta began rolling out an autofill checkbox on some ad accounts, and only for the email and phone number fields. Turn off autofill If your account has it, untick it for both fields and make people type their own contact details, because the details Meta holds can be years out of date. If your account doesn't have it, you aren't doing anything wrong. The rollout is partial and there's no way to request it.
Which is why the reliable levers are the two that exist in every account. The first is the form type. The default is called more volume, and it's built for exactly the frictionless tap-and-submit experience described above. The alternative is higher intent, which adds a review step where the person has to confirm their details before the form goes through. Instant form types One extra screen. It sounds like nothing, and it filters out a surprising share of the people who were never really there.
The second lever is custom questions. Meta can't prefill an answer it doesn't have, so any question you write yourself forces the person to type. Whatever happens with the checkbox rollout, this one is yours everywhere, forever.
Which questions should you add?
The ones that qualify the job, whatever that means in your trade. Suburb. Job type. Rough timeframe. Whether it's their own house. One open text field with a placeholder that tells them what you actually want to know, because message gets you nothing, and tell us roughly what needs doing and when you were hoping to start gets you a paragraph you can price from.
Every question you add pushes your cost per lead up. That isn't a side effect, it's the mechanism. You're spending the same budget on fewer, better people, and the ones who complete the longer form either genuinely want a quote or are already at the point of booking the work.
What happens after they submit?
Everything above raises the quality of what lands in your inbox. None of it matters if the enquiry then sits there until tomorrow afternoon. The person who filled in your form filled in two others the same evening, and the first business to respond properly usually wins, so the first touch goes out within minutes, by text, and it doesn't sell anything. It confirms. Hi, just checking this is the right number, you were asking about the deck? A reply, any reply, turns a form fill into a conversation, and a conversation is the thing you can actually quote from.
You don't need to write any of this from scratch. We keep a set of follow-up messages you can copy straight into whatever CRM you use, covering the missed call, the quote chase, the review ask and the rest. Five automations every business needs Steal them. That's what they're there for.
How do you judge whether it worked?
Not on cost per lead. That figure will get worse the moment you make these changes, and if cost per lead is the number being reported to you, the changes will look like a failure. Judge it on contactable leads, on quotes sent, and on booked jobs. If 46 leads gave you six conversations before, and 20 leads give you twelve conversations after, your dashboard got uglier and your business got better.
That is the whole trade. It runs completely against the instinct to make the numbers as good as possible, which is exactly why almost nobody running their own ads makes it, and why plenty of people paid on their reported numbers don't make it either.
Will this not kill my lead volume?
It will reduce it, yes. That's the point. The volume you lose is heavily weighted towards the people who would never have answered the phone, because they were never really there. If you have too few enquiries rather than too many bad ones, the fix belongs upstream in budget and creative, not in making the form easier again.
I can't find the autofill checkbox in my account. Am I missing something?
Probably not. Meta rolls features out unevenly and the autofill checkbox is one of them, so plenty of accounts simply don't have it yet. The higher intent form type and custom questions exist in every account, and between them they do most of what the checkbox does anyway.
Should I stop running lead forms entirely?
No. Lead forms are the right tool in the right place, and the right place is mostly retargeting, where the person already knows you and doesn't need convincing so much as a low-friction way to raise their hand. For cold traffic, a dedicated page you own does the convincing a form can't.
