Imagine you spend $3,000 a month on Google Ads. Your phone rings. You get excited for about 11 seconds.

Then you pick up, and it is a lady who wants you to "just trim one branch." Or some guy who already collected four quotes and is fishing for the lowest number.

So you blame Google. You blame the agency. You assume paid advertising just does not work for tree services.

Meanwhile, you are paying $3,000 a month to train your front office to hate the phone. Your best estimator is burning 90 minutes driving across town to quote a $200 job. And every garbage lead that wastes your crew's time is teaching you the wrong lesson: that marketing does not work.

Marketing works fine. Your message is broken.

Your ad is a magnet. Whatever it says determines what walks through your door. If your ad leads with "Affordable tree service, free estimates, call now," what do you think that attracts?

The bargain hunter. The person who got five quotes and is picking the cheapest one. The homeowner who thinks tree work should cost the same as a lawn mowing.

You told Google to find those people. And Google, being very good at its job, went and found them. Maybe even by the hundreds.

Now picture a different ad. One that says: "Certified arborists specializing in hazardous removals over structures. Fully insured. Rigging plans for every job."

That ad does not get clicked by the person looking for a cheap stump grind. It gets clicked by the homeowner with a 70-foot dead oak leaning over their garage who is scared and wants someone who clearly knows what they are doing. It gets clicked by the property manager who needs 40 trees maintained at an HOA complex and wants a professional crew, not a guy with a pickup truck.

Same platform. Same budget. Totally different customer walking through the door.

When was the last time you actually read your own ad? Not glanced at it. Read it out loud. And asked yourself: would the customer I actually want respond to this?

Your ads are a filter. Right now, most of them are set to "let everything through." That is why your crew is quoting $150 trim jobs when they should be on-site for a $6,000 hazardous removal.

Run your current ads through these four questions:

1. Does your ad mention price or "free" anything?

If the first thing a prospect sees is "free estimate" or "affordable rates," you just gave Google/Facebook more leeway to find bargain hunters. The property manager who needs 40 trees pruned at an HOA complex does not care about free estimates. She cares about insurance, credentials, and whether you can handle the scope without tearing up the common areas.

What signal are you sending in the first five seconds?

2. Does your ad describe a specific problem, or does it just list services?

"Tree removal, trimming, stump grinding, emergency service." That is a menu. Not a magnet.

Compare that to: "That dead oak leaning toward your roof is not going to wait for you to get three more quotes."

One of those makes a homeowner with a real problem stop scrolling. The other gets skimmed by everyone and clicked by nobody with money.

3. Does your ad photo look like every other tree service ad?

If your image is a guy in a bucket truck with a blue sky behind him, you look identical to every other result on the page. The homeowner literally cannot tell you apart from the $500 hack down the road.

What if your photo showed a before and after of a complex removal next to a house? Or a rigging setup that clearly shows you planned the job? Or a crew photo where your people look professional and your trucks are clean?

The photo is doing half the selling. And most tree service ads are using stock photos or blurry shots from 2019.

4. Are you running one ad for every type of customer?

If you want commercial contracts, your commercial ad should say different things than your residential ad. If you want high-value removals, that ad should look and sound different than your pruning ad.

Running one ad for all customers is like fishing with a net full of basketball-sized holes. You catch minnows and everything else swims right through.

A tree service spending $4,200 a month on Google Ads was pulling an average lead worth about $380 in revenue. Volume was fine. Margins were brutal. Most leads wanted small jobs and the closing rate sat under 30%.

We looked at their ads. Every headline said "Free Estimates." Stock photo of a tree. The ad copy listed six services in a row with no specifics about any of them. The ad spoke to everyone and attracted no one worth quoting.

Three changes. Replaced the stock photo with a real job site photo. Changed the headline from "Free Estimates" to language about hazardous tree risk and property protection. Split the campaign so residential and commercial had separate ads with separate messaging.

Same budget. Same platforms. Lead quality shifted in about three weeks. Average job value went from $380 to over $900. Closing rate went from 29% to 44%. Not because they got more leads. Because they started getting different leads.

Do you know your average job value from paid leads? If you do not know that number, you have no way to tell whether your ads are actually working or just keeping you busy with jobs that barely cover diesel.

Here is something most agencies will not tell you.

Your budget is probably fine. You may not need to spend more money on ads until you’ve pinpointed the right bottleneck.

What you need to do is stop running ads that attract the exact type of customer you do not want.

The reason most tree service ads pull in garbage leads is not because Google is broken or Facebook changed its algorithm again. Those platforms are machines. You tell the machine "find people who click on cheap tree service," and it will find every price-sensitive person within 30 miles. It is extremely good at this.

The fix may not be more money, but changing the message so the machine hunts for a different type of person.

If you could spend the same $3,000 a month and get half the leads but double the average job value, would you take that trade?

Because 15 leads at an average of $2,500 each is $37,500 in revenue. And 30 leads at an average of $400 is $12,000. Half the phone calls. Triple the money. Less windshield time. Less quoting. Fewer tire-kickers wasting your front office's afternoon.

Your ad is the filter. Most tree service companies have the filter turned off and then wonder why everything that comes through is junk.

If you read this and thought "that sounds like my ads," you are probably right.

Hit reply and tell me a few things:

I read every reply.

And if I’ve seen a company your size fix the exact problem you are describing, I will point you in the right direction.

Until next week, keep your crews busy and phones ringing.

-Jacob Hastings