The four account-structure mistakes that cost EV installers the most, and the targeted fixes that bring cost-per-install back into a sensible range.
If your cost per install on paid ads is over £200, your account is probably haemorrhaging money in places you cannot see. The good news is that for most EV installers I audit, three or four targeted fixes will cut that number in half within 30 days. Not because of clever optimisation, but because the basics are usually broken.
This piece walks through the four most common account-structure mistakes, how to fix each one, and what good actually looks like by the end of the month. No clever tricks. Just the things you really should already be doing.
Most installers running ads obsess over click cost (CPC) or impressions. Both are vanity metrics for an installer. The only metric that matters is cost per qualified enquiry, and ideally, cost per install.
Cost per install = total ad spend in a month divided by total installs that came from those ads. That is the number you optimise around. It is also the number that nobody on Reddit or in YouTube tutorials talks about, because it is harder to measure than CPC.
To track it, you need three things connected:
If you cannot calculate cost per install today, that is your first job. You cannot optimise what you do not measure, and almost every clever thing you try will be guessing.
The most common installer ad account I audit has 8 to 12 campaigns running, each at £5 to £10 per day. The owner thinks they are testing different angles. In reality, none of those campaigns ever gets enough conversions for the algorithm to optimise.
Meta and Google's ad systems work on a learning curve. They need roughly 30 to 50 conversions per ad set per week to leave learning mode. Below that, the system is essentially guessing, and you are paying premium click prices to fund the guessing.
The fix:
You will feel like you are giving up control. Counter-intuitively, you will see results improve within two weeks because the algorithm finally has enough data to work.
If your ad clicks land on your generic homepage, you are training your audience to bounce. The homepage is built for everyone. An ad campaign should land on a page built for the specific offer the ad makes.
For an EV installer, that means at minimum:
Each landing page strips out the navigation (so the visitor cannot wander away), focuses on one outcome, and includes proof relevant to that segment. A homeowner does not want to read about your commercial fleet contracts. A facilities manager does not care about your residential install gallery.
Specialised landing pages typically lift conversion by 60 to 120% over the homepage. That is effectively free. You are not spending more on ads, you are just sending the click somewhere it can convert.
Creative fatigue is real. The same image and headline that converted brilliantly in week 1 stops working in week 4 because your audience has seen it 12 times. If you do not refresh your creative, your CPM creeps up and CPC creeps up, slowly killing your unit economics.
The simplest creative testing system:
For images, the ones that work for installers tend to share these qualities:
For video, 9 to 15 second clips of an actual install with one line of voice-over consistently outperform polished brand films. Production value is less important than authenticity.
Cold ad performance is what most installers focus on. Retargeting (ads shown to people who already visited your site) is where the cheap installs hide. People who clicked once and did not convert are 5 to 10 times more likely to convert on a second touch than a cold audience.
Yet 7 out of 10 installer ad accounts I audit have no retargeting. They are paying premium prices for a first click and then never showing those visitors anything again.
What good retargeting looks like for installers:
Average cost-per-install reduction when each fix is applied in isolation, across 9 EV installer accounts
For most UK EV installers, the rule of thumb on a healthy paid ad account looks roughly like this:
Compare these against your own numbers. If you are above the top end of any range, you have a leak. If you are below the bottom end, you might be running ads at unsustainable scale that will tighten as you ramp up. Most installers are somewhere in the middle, with one or two leaks pulling the cost-per-install number up.
If you are starting from zero, run Google Local Service Ads first. They appear at the top of "EV charger installer near me" results, charge per qualified lead (not per click), and have built-in vetting through reviews and licensing.
Once that is humming, add Meta ads. Meta is better for top-of-funnel demand creation (people who are thinking about an EV but have not searched yet) and brand-building.
Reserve Google Search Ads (the regular ones) for specific high-intent keywords like "ev charger installer [postcode]" or "OZEV grant installer". Less efficient for general awareness.
Skip TikTok ads as a primary channel for installs. The audience is younger and the conversion path is too long for high-ticket residential services. Use TikTok for organic content, paid ads elsewhere.
If you are running ads now and want to drop your cost per install in the next month, run this in order:
30 days, four big fixes. Most installers see cost per install drop by 30 to 50% in this window. The compounding continues over the next quarter as the algorithm learns more about your now-cleaner account.
Most "ad agencies" you can hire will charge you £1,500 to £3,000 a month to do less than what is in this article. The work is genuinely not that complicated. What is hard is the discipline to do it consistently for 12 months while testing, refining and learning.
If you are happy to put in 30 to 60 minutes a week, you can run your own account profitably with a simple structure and discipline. If your time is genuinely worth more than that, find an operator who agrees to be measured on cost per install, not on activity reports.
Either way, the goal is the same. Spend less to get more installs. The numbers in this article are achievable for almost every installer, and the gap between most accounts and "good" is closed in 30 days, not 30 months.
Drop the URL of your highest-spend campaign and we will tell you the three biggest leaks and how much you could save in the next 30 days. Free, no call required.