Jake Sheldon on making Facebook ads work for pest control

When Jake Sheldon started running a $67 initial service on Facebook, other pest control owners in his town messaged him to say he was ruining the industry. They kept seeing his ads. Jake was losing money on those first visits, and he was fine with it.

Jake and I are partners now. He, Jonas Olson and I run Pest Control Millionaires together and wrote Zip Code Kings. When we recorded this, the first episode of Pest Control Legends, I was about to release an SEO course inside his and Jonas’s program.

Jake had been on my other show, Local Marketing Secrets, where we covered a bit of everything. This time we stuck to Facebook ads, since so many owners have tried them without much luck.

Who is Jake Sheldon?

Jake Sheldon is a co-founder of Pest Control Millionaires and one of the biggest names in pest control marketing. About 6 years before this episode, he started Pest Customers Fast, an agency running Facebook ads for pest control companies. He grew it to 368 clients and sold it.

He was also a partial owner in 9 local home service businesses, including a million-dollar pest control company, and had spent millions of dollars on Facebook ads across them. His own pest control company usually does 500 to 750 general pest sales from Facebook alone, not counting SEO or Google. His Pest Control Millionaires profile has more on his background.

Start with lead ads

A lot of owners start with a boosted post or an awareness ad, which is usually just burning money. You’d have a better chance, he told me, piling your money up in a cul-de-sac and lighting it on fire, since at least people would be drawn to the fire. He still leads with that warning. It was the first thing he told Jonas when they talked about getting pest control customers for free on the PCM podcast.

He recommends lead ads, because you can target them by age, gender and zip code. You can’t really do that with a boosted post.

In Jake’s view, owners past 7 figures can afford awareness campaigns and retargeting. Below that, most owners need a return now, so lead ads come first.

The $67 initial that made other owners mad

After targeting, the next reason Jake sees ads fail is a weak offer, like “call now” or $50 off. If you own a pest control company, he said, you’ve probably tried $50 off already, because everyone has.

Jake has talked to thousands of pest control owners, and every one believes they’re the best at servicing homes. When one owner told him so, Jake had already heard it from 5 others in the same city.

“Everyone thinks they are the best. And you might be the one who actually is the best. You might be, but no one knows that truly because it’s just an opinion basis at that point.”

His initials used to run $100 to $300, about $200 on average. Then a mentor asked him what kind of customers he really wanted, and the answer was recurring ones. Termite and bed bug jobs don’t come back next year, but a recurring customer pays every year, refers friends and adds equity value. In Jake’s example, a $10M company built on recurring customers could sell for $30M or $40M.

So Jake cut the initial to $67 for anyone who signed up for a year and kept it at $200 for anyone who didn’t. Leads flowed in. The initial takes the longest and uses the most product, so after ad costs, tech time and insurance, he lost money on it. He made it back on the quarterly services that started 30 days later, and that offer is how his first pest control company took off.

“They’re not willing to even lose money or drop their initial because they’re so used to making quite a bit of profit on that initial. They’re not willing to do that. But I was.”

I pointed listeners to Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers, where a lot of this thinking comes from. Jake threw out another idea, a $39 mosquito treatment with half off the first general pest service. Before you pick one, look at what the competitors in your town are running so yours doesn’t look like theirs. When Jake came back on the show, we spent a lot more time on offers and closing.

Judge Facebook by cost per customer

Owners are used to the calls they get from ranking on Google and from Local Service Ads, which are high-intent leads. When they expect the same quality from Facebook, Jake told me, that’s “so far away from the truth.”

By his numbers, Facebook lead ads average a 20% to 30% close rate, and his company is really happy at 35% to 40%. About 40% of leads never answer at all.

So he watches cost per acquisition instead. Anywhere from $75 to about $150 for a general pest customer is a number he likes, and his agency averaged about $100. Leads run from $10 to about $40 depending on season and zip code.

Every ad wears out

Jake used to run mostly images. Then he partnered with Jonas Olson, who’s a master at video, and video started working well too.

Video has a downside, though. It burns out faster. Facebook calls it creative fatigue, and every ad hits it eventually, so you keep making new ones. That’s easy for Jonas, who makes tons of content anyway. Jake still prefers images and puts less spend behind video, because it’s a lot of work to make.

Whatever you run, keep A/B testing, since Facebook’s algorithm is built to test.

Even a winning campaign runs its course. Jake pointed to a Little Caesars campaign that ran on Facebook, radio and TV for a long time and still ended. They keep selling the same pizza and just frame it differently, and Jake thinks general pest ads need the same treatment.

That reminded me of the purple cow idea MrBeast keeps bringing up (Seth Godin wrote a book on it). You forget a regular cow, but a bright purple one sticks for years, and a kind of boring service like pest control needs that even more.

Put a spider in the ad

Some of the largest companies in the industry run ads with a technician leaning on his truck, arms folded, next to a line like “call today.” Jake wants the pain point in the creative, like a spider crawling across the screen that startles people mid-scroll. That’s a big part of why Jonas’s content performs so well, with crazy spiders and rodents that catch you off guard.

People buy pest control because of a pain point, Jake said, while a med spa can sell Botox on pure desire.

“Pest control is not exciting to buy. So you have to disrupt people, hit their pain points, and so they’re like, ‘Oh man, oh my gosh, I do need to buy pest control.’”

Since the buyer on Facebook is usually a homeowner, most often the wife, I suggested playing up danger to the kids. Jake agreed. More than 75% of the time, he said, the buyers are women 35 to 55, though Florida, with a lot of people 65 and up, is different.

It can flip between zip codes, too. Running ads in Dallas for a buddy, Jake found women 45 to 55 buying in one zip code and men 65 and up right across the street.

Facebook needs months of data

A lot of owners give up on Facebook after a month or two, maybe 3.

“If you started a pest control business and only tried it for three months, you wouldn’t quit. But for some reason, people when they advertise, they’ll try it for three months and they’ll quit.”

Jake explains it with a fishing net. You start with a wide radius around a city and let leads come through. Red fish are people you don’t want, so you turn those ad sets off. Blue fish aren’t ideal, but they pay, so they stay. Green fish are your ideal customers. Jake tags them in a GoHighLevel pipeline, loads them back into Facebook as a custom audience and builds a lookalike from it. It’s slow, but you’re getting customers the whole time.

A good source audience speeds that up, like the customer list of an HVAC company in town, used with permission through a strategic partnership. Buying data works too, but it’s expensive.

Budget matters as well. Facebook runs ads on an auction, and engagement moves you up. In Jake’s opinion (he’s clear Facebook hasn’t confirmed it), a campaign needs at least $600 a month. Every time he’s spent less, he’s ranked super low.

Call every lead 3 times a day for 5 days

When someone fills out Jake’s lead form, GoHighLevel texts the owner or rep to call right away. Speed to lead matters more than anything with Facebook leads, he said, because an hour later people can forget you.

Most people ignore numbers they don’t have saved, so Jake calls back-to-back, the way Meta’s own reps call 3 times in a row when you have an appointment with them. GoHighLevel’s AI can also text leads and keep the conversation going, and Jake thinks it’s fantastic for lead nurturing.

His team calls each lead 3 times a day for the first 5 days. Some owners think that’s nuts, but it’s how they hit a $75 to $150 acquisition cost, closed thousands of accounts and built a 7-figure company off Facebook ads. A virtual assistant at $6 to $12 an hour can make those calls too.

The cheapest leads come from half-finished forms

Jake wants the Facebook pixel on your website. A Facebook rep once described it to him as a little leech on your site’s header that tracks where visitors go, so you can run ads to them later. You can also retarget people who watched, say, 70% of a video.

For pest control, Jake pushes hardest on people who opened the lead form and never finished. Maybe they typed their name and email, then their kid spilled a glass of milk. You can reach back 90 days, and that’s where his team gets really cheap leads. He walks through the setup in his guide to Facebook retargeting for pest control.

My take

My side of marketing works the other way. Pest Control SEO helps owners show up for people who already have ants in the kitchen and are searching, through their Google Business Profile, website and Local Service Ads. Jake agrees those calls are higher intent. Facebook finds people who weren’t looking yet, which is why his offer and follow-up do so much of the work.

When Jake talked about owners quitting after 3 months, he brought up SEO in the same breath, and he’s right. Rankings and reviews build slowly, just like his ideal-customer audience. The two channels meet at the pixel, too. Every local homeowner who finds your website on Google can end up in your retargeting audience, so the SEO work makes Facebook spend go further. For the rest of Jake’s playbook, his pest control Facebook ads guide covers a lot we didn’t get to.

Where to find Jake

Jake calls himself a Facebook guy, so that’s the easiest place to reach him. He was planning to start a YouTube channel when we recorded, and it’s live now.

• Pest Control Millionaires, the first place Jake told people to look
• Jake’s personal Facebook
• Jake’s LinkedIn profile
• Jake’s YouTube channel