How much should a tree service spend on ads?
The honest answer is that it depends on what your crew can physically handle, not on a percentage of revenue you read somewhere. But there is real arithmetic underneath it, and getting the arithmetic wrong is more common than getting the number wrong.
Start with what you can service, not what you can afford
Leads you cannot get to within a couple of days are worse than no leads. They cost money, they annoy homeowners, and they turn into reviews you did not want. So the first question is not budget, it is how many jobs a week your crew can actually take on top of what you have already booked.
Work backwards from there. If you can absorb five more jobs a week and you close roughly a third of quotes, you need somewhere around fifteen genuine enquiries a week before the budget question even starts.
The arithmetic that catches almost everyone
A thousand dollars a month is $33.33 a day. Thirty is what gets typed, because thirty looks like a thousand a month to anyone glancing at it.
Across a full thirty-day cycle, $30 a day delivers $900. That is a hundred dollars of agreed budget that quietly never worked, every cycle, on a number that looks completely correct on the screen. If you take one thing from this page, open your ad account and check whether your daily budget is the number you think it is.
It is worth setting budgets in clean multiples of $1,000 per thirty days for exactly this reason: the daily figure is then always a third of a round number, and a wrong one is easy to spot.
What a budget actually buys, roughly
As a working rule we plan on about one lead per day for every full $30 per day of spend. It is a step, not a smooth line: $35 or $40 a day is still realistically one a day, and the second lead arrives somewhere around $60.
That is deliberately conservative and it is a planning figure, not a promise. Costs vary by market, by season and by how competitive your area is. But it is a far more useful starting point than a percentage of revenue, because it connects the money directly to something you can staff for.
Raising the budget mid-cycle is normal
Budgets often get raised partway through a cycle to make up for a slow first fortnight. That is fine, and it is one reason a raised daily figure does not immediately mean more leads per day: some of that money is catching up rather than adding.
It does mean any report you receive has to know when the budget changed. A company that moved from $1,000 to $2,000 a month will look like it massively underspent the earlier months unless the report scores each period against the budget that was actually agreed at the time.
A gap is not automatically an underspend
If you agreed $2,000 a month and then dropped to $1,000, the month you dropped in will land low against the old target by design. That is not unspent budget to be carried over, and any report telling you it is has told you something untrue about your own money.
The genuine underspends are the ones worth chasing: a campaign that quietly stopped delivering, a card that declined, a budget set to a number nobody rechecked.
Questions
What is a normal starting budget for a tree company?
Most of the accounts here run in multiples of $1,000 per thirty days. Where you start depends on how many extra jobs a week you can genuinely take. Starting lower than you can afford and stepping up once the leads are being handled well is almost always the better path.
Should I spend more in storm season?
Usually yes on Google, because there are genuinely more people searching and the demand is there to capture. On Facebook the case is different, since that platform creates demand rather than waiting for it.
Is a percentage of revenue a good rule?
Not really. It tells you nothing about whether you can service the work, which is the actual constraint on a tree crew. Capacity first, then budget.