Storm weeks are a bidding war
When the wind hits, every tree company and every storm chaser is live. Without a plan for those days, you pay triple for the same call.
A bucket truck and a crane cost money whether they move or not. Keep them moving.
Tree work clicks cost $10 to $40 depending on the season, and the day after a storm every company in town is bidding at once. The rest of the year the searches are mostly “who do I call about a stump” and people asking the city to do it.
We split the budget by job type, go heavy on removals and emergencies, keep the arborist-advice searches out, and track calls to the estimates that actually sign.
Jobs from $500 to $8,000, crane removals more. The upside is real. So is the waste, and here’s where it usually comes from.
When the wind hits, every tree company and every storm chaser is live. Without a plan for those days, you pay triple for the same call.
“Is my oak dying” and “when to trim maple trees” are gardening questions. They use the same words as a $4,000 removal.
Fuel, insurance, climbers and a chipper add up fast. A slow week in February hurts more than a slow week in a lawn service.
Removal, trimming, emergency, stumps: Four campaigns, four budgets. Removals and emergencies get the money, stumps get the leftovers.Storm mode: A pre-built emergency campaign we switch on when weather hits your area, with ads that say “same day” and a crew phone that answers.Negatives for the curious and the cheap: Tree identification, disease questions, “free wood”, city tree programs, arborist jobs, nursery searches. Cut weekly.Estimates tracked to signed: Call tracking plus ArboStar, Jobber or SingleOps, so bidding learns from signed work and not from people pricing a hedge.Examples from tree service accounts. The real lists run to hundreds of terms and get reviewed every week.
Your account is run by two PPC pros with 20+ years each. No handoff to a coordinator juggling 35 accounts.
Not quarterly. Not “when the algorithm settles”. Every week, by hand, so the junk never gets a chance to pile up.
Your Google Ads account, your data, your tracking, from day one. Leave anytime and take it all with you.
Who likes 12-month contracts? We don’t. We earn the next quarter by making the last one pay.
A two-crew company in a mid-size metro usually runs $3k to $8k a month, with more held back for storm weeks. We set the spend to how many crew days you can sell.
No. One tree service company per metro. If a competitor across town calls us, they get a polite no.
Yes, but we would rather keep a small campaign going year round. Removals and winter pruning still get searched, and the account keeps learning instead of starting from scratch every spring.
Fuel, labor and dump fees eat the margin. Clicks have to bring jobs worth the drive.
How we run it →Trucks, crews and a short summer. Every click has to earn a booked date.
How we run it →Plows, salt and overtime are fixed costs. Contracts are how you cover them.
How we run it →Haul fees, landfill tonnage, ten stops a day per truck. Volume close to home wins.
How we run it →Talk to a senior PPC expert who has run tree service accounts. Never a junior.