You write a check every month for advertising. Google Ads, Facebook, LSAs, maybe all three. Somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 leaves your account.

How many booked jobs did that money produce last month? What was the average ticket on those jobs? And what did each new customer actually cost you to acquire?

If you cannot answer those three questions right now, you are not running advertising. You are writing a monthly check and hoping.

You are not alone. We manage over $1.5 million a month in ad spend across home services, and we audit tree service ad accounts every single week. The majority of owners we talk to cannot answer those questions. Not because they are bad at business. They built companies worth millions on good work and reputation. They cannot answer because nobody ever showed them what the numbers are supposed to look like.

Most agencies will not show you these benchmarks. Because if you knew what $3,000 a month should be producing, you would realize half of them are coasting on your money.

So I am going to give you the numbers right now. Print this out if you want. Sit down with your last three months of ad spend and compare.

These benchmarks come from real ad accounts we manage and audit across the country. Your market, your services, and your average ticket will shift these numbers. But if you are way outside these ranges, something could be wrong and somebody owes you an explanation.

At $1,500 to $2,500 per month in a mid-size market:

If your agency is spending $2,000 a month and you are getting 8 calls, that is a $250 cost per lead before you even try to close anybody. Something is broken. Either the keywords are pulling in the wrong searches, or the ads are attracting tire-kickers instead of real customers.

At $1,000 to $2,000 per month:

If you are spending $3,000 a month across these channels, here is what you should be seeing:

If your numbers are worse than that, one of three things is happening. Your targeting is wrong and you are paying for clicks from people outside your service area or searching for things you do not do. Your ads are attracting the wrong customer. Or your follow-up is too slow and leads are booking with whoever called back first.

Forget impressions. Forget clicks. Forget "reach" and whatever else shows up in that pretty PDF your agency sends once a month.

The only number worth tracking is cost per booked job. Not cost per lead. Cost per job that actually showed up on the schedule and got invoiced.

Do you know that number? Not "I think my agency tracks that." Do you personally know what you paid to put each new customer on the schedule last month?

If the answer is no, that is the first thing to fix. Everything else is noise until you know that number.

You do not need to understand Google Ads to spot these. Five minutes of attention will tell you what is happening.

Your monthly report has a lot of graphs and percentages, but no numbers tied to actual jobs booked. If the report does not connect ad spend to revenue, it is designed to look good, not to be useful.

Your agency has not called you proactively in more than 60 days. If they only talk to you when you initiate, they are managing the relationship, not the account.

Your ad copy has not changed in 6 months. Go look. Log in to your Google Ads account or ask them to show you the current headlines. If they are the same ones from when you signed up, nobody is testing. Nobody is improving. The account is on autopilot.

Any one of these can be a coincidence. But check. Your ad spend could be on cruise control with nobody at the wheel.

Here is what bugs me about how this industry handles ad spend.

The number on the invoice is not the real cost.

Say you pay $3,000 to Google and $1,000 to your agency. That is $4,000. Fine. But the real cost includes every hour your front office spent fielding calls from people who wanted a $150 stump grind. Every 90-minute round trip your estimator made for a $200 job that came from a garbage keyword. Every qualified lead that went to your competitor because nobody picked up the phone fast enough.

The true cost of poorly managed advertising is not $4,000 a month. It is $4,000 plus the revenue you lost because the budget was spent attracting people who were never going to buy real tree work.

Most agencies do not talk about this because their job is to deliver leads, not booked jobs. They hand you a report that says "47 leads this month" and call it a win. But if 30 of those leads were junk, you got 17 real opportunities and paid $4,000 for them. That changes the math considerably.

So here is my question for you: Are your ads attracting customers who are worth more than what you paid to find them? And I mean the total cost. The ad spend, the agency fee, the time your team burned chasing leads that never should have come in.

If you do not know, now you know what to measure. The benchmarks are up above. Go check yours.

If you ran those numbers and something looks off (or you have no idea what your cost per booked job actually is), hit reply and tell me:

I'll tell you exactly where to start looking for the leak, based on what we see in other tree service accounts at your spend level.

For those with storms and tornadoes coming through, I hope you and your families are safe through these weather events!

See you all next Saturday.

-Jacob
The Backcut