Digital ad campaigns are no longer optional for tree service companies. If you want to keep your calendar full and continue to grow, you simply have to roll out ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, or other high-traffic channels. Many tree-care companies have already received this memo and jumped into the world of pay-per-click and pay-per-lead advertising.
The problem is they don’t know how well their ads are performing. They don’t know if their ads are converting as well as the ads their competitors are running.
Don’t worry – we’ll share some benchmarks so that you can know whether your campaigns are already performing well or require some help and fine tuning.
What Does “Conversion Rate” Mean for Tree Service Companies?
There are a number of unfamiliar terms that often come up in discussions of tree-care ad campaigns. For example, you may hear of click-through rate or CTR. This is simply the number of people who click on your ad divided by the total number of people who saw your ad (often called “impressions”).
In other words, if 100 people were served your ad and 20 of them clicked on it, you’d have a 20% click-through rate or CTR. Click-through rates are certainly important, but they’re not the ultimate barometer of success. You need people to not only click on your ad, but also do something like submit a lead form or contact you by phone — something called a conversion.
Different tree companies consider different behaviors to be “conversions,” but phone calls and form submissions are the two most common. Others include things like browsing your website for more than 30 seconds.
Your conversion rate is the number of people who complete this conversion action divided by the number of people who clicked on your ad. So, using our example from above, if 20 people click on your ad and 10 of them submit a form, your conversion rate would be 50%.
Benchmarks: What Is a Good Conversion Rate for a Tree-Care Company?
Now that you understand some of the terminology marketers often use when discussing ad campaigns, you’ll likely want to know how your ads are stacking up against your competitors.
Unfortunately, that’s not especially easy to do, as few researchers collect this kind of hyper-granular data. Try though we have, we simply can’t find anyone who has analyzed a significant amount of data specifically related to ad performance for tree-care companies.
However, the average conversion rate across all industries was 7.52% in 2025. This gives us a starting point, but it includes everything from tech companies to attorneys to brain surgeons. We can narrow down that group a little by only considering the “home & home improvement” category, which would include tree-care services. In this subgroup, the average conversion rate was slightly lower, coming in at 7.33%, according to LocaliQ.
Factors That Influence a “Good” Rate
It’s important to note that conversion rates vary based on a variety of factors. And this means that your tree-care company may have a very different conversion rate from a competitor on the other side of town. A few of the most important variables influencing conversion rates include the factors listed below.
Ad Platform
The platform you choose for your ad campaign will significantly affect your conversion rate. For example, Google Search campaigns and Local Service Ads usually convert best because they capture people looking for a tree service right now.
Meanwhile, Google Display ads and social media ads posted on Facebook or Instagram tend to generate more top-of-funnel clicks. This means they’re great for awareness, but they don’t lead to a lot of phone calls or form submissions. The result is lower overall conversion rates, since your clicks didn’t come from people actively searching for tree work.
Service Type
The relative amount of urgency driving a searcher’s efforts also factors into your conversion rate.
People searching for things like emergency removals, storm damage, or hazardous tree care are more likely to book your services or at least fill out a submission form, thereby leading to above-average conversion rates.
On the other hand, campaigns promoting routine pruning, plant-health care, or seasonal treatments attract more comparison shoppers who may take longer to decide, resulting in lower conversion percentages.
Market Size & Competition
Your location also matters when it comes to conversion rates.
If you’re advertising in a dense urban market that has multiple established tree services bidding on the same keywords, you may face stiffer competition for leads. But suburban or rural areas with fewer competitors will often lead to slightly higher conversion rates, simply because there’s less competition.
However, the total lead volume may be lower in less-crowded markets, because there are simply fewer potential customers available.
Landing Page Quality
Your ad copy and creative assets are important for getting people to click on the ad, but once they do, you need an effective landing page to get them to book your services. Otherwise, you may enjoy great click-through rates while watching your conversion rate languish.
This means you’ll want to ensure your landing page looks fantastic on both desktop and mobile devices, features compelling, conversion-oriented language, and contains clear CTAs (“Call Now” buttons or form submissions).
It’s also important that your landing page loads very quickly. Shaving even a single second off its load time can boost your conversion rates significantly.
Don’t Forget to Handle Leads Quickly
While you may consider a lead form submission a conversion, it’s not the same thing as a sale — it’s your ultimate goal. And it won’t matter if you have the best conversion rate in the world if you don’t turn your conversions into paying clients.
So, make sure that your team handles everything after the point of conversion properly. This means answering or returning phone calls promptly or following up on form submissions quickly. In fact, responding within a matter of minutes will often drastically increase your chances of booking the job.
Look at it this way: A tree-service company that only generates a 5% conversion rate but closes nearly 100% of those conversions will perform as well as a company that records a 10% conversion rate, while letting half of their potential customers get away.
How to Improve Your Tree Company’s Conversion Rates
Even if your current conversion rate is below the home-improvement industry average, there’s good news: Conversion rates are one of the most controllable parts of your entire ad strategy. Try a few of these things to start generating more form submissions and calls from potential clients clicking on your ads:
- Tighten up your geographic targeting and keyword targeting. Don’t waste budget on people outside your service area or on vague, low-intent searches. Use negative keywords, radius targeting, and service-specific terms to zero in on the people who are actually ready to hire.
- Use call-only ads for emergencies. When storms roll through, homeowners aren’t interested in filling out a form; they want a human on the phone now. Call-only ads cut out extra steps and put you directly on the line with urgent prospects, which often leads to the highest conversion rates of any campaign type.
- Link to fast-loading, single-offer landing pages. Every extra second of load time or additional decision a user has to make can cost you leads. So, keep things simple: Use a single landing page targeting a single service and featuring a big, clear call-to-action.
- Implement call tracking and record analytics. Clicks don’t keep the lights on — booked jobs do. Call tracking numbers, form conversion tracking, and even recorded call analytics help you measure conversions and identify gaps. This way, you’ll know which campaigns drive the most qualified leads, not just the most traffic.
When you layer these improvements together, you create a feedback loop. Better targeting brings in higher-intent prospects, better landing pages make it easy for them to act, and faster response times turn those leads into paying jobs.
The end result is a lower cost per lead and a healthier return on ad spend.
Let ORB Tree Service Marketing Help Improve Your Conversion Rate
Don’t feel bad if you’re struggling to achieve a good conversion rate. Putting together an effective ad campaign requires an entirely different skill set than the one you’ve used to build your tree-care company.
The difference between tree-care companies that struggle to achieve a good conversion rate and those that are buried in calls and form submissions is that the former often try to manage ad campaigns internally, while the latter don’t hesitate to outsource their advertising needs.
But that doesn’t mean you want to hire a generic agency promising impossible results. This is unlikely to do anything but separate you from more of your money. Instead, you want to hire a trustworthy growth partner who understands the unique challenges tree-service companies face — that’s exactly what you get from ORB Tree Service Marketing.
Set up a call with our CEO now. He’d love to learn more about your business and current advertising efforts and then outline some of the things we could do to help you scale.
Sources and References
- Digital Benchmarks by Industry: PPC — WordStream
A data-heavy breakdown of average conversion rates, CTRs, and costs across industries — helpful for comparing tree service numbers to broader PPC performance.
https://www.wordstream.com/ppc-benchmarks - Search Advertising Benchmarks for Every Industry — LocaliQ
Offers a clear snapshot of search ad benchmarks by vertical, including “Home Services,” which tree companies can use as a realistic point of comparison.
https://localiq.com/blog/search-advertising-benchmarks/ - The Ultimate Google Ads Glossary – 2025 Edition — LovesData
A comprehensive glossary that explains PPC terminology in plain language, making it a great reference for anyone new to paid advertising vocabulary.
https://www.lovesdata.com/blog/google-ads-glossary - Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) — WordStream
A best-practices guide for improving landing pages, ad funnels, and campaign structure to raise conversion rates.
https://www.wordstream.com/conversion-rate-optimization - Marketing Arboricultural Services — Arboriculture & Urban Forestry (ISA Journal)
An ISA-published paper exploring how arborists can use marketing tools like newsletters and service awareness to grow their businesses.
https://auf.isa-arbor.com/content/18/4/205 - Marketing Tree Care — Arboriculture & Urban Forestry (ISA Journal)
An early but still insightful look at applying general marketing principles to tree care services, offering perspective from within the arborist profession.
https://auf.isa-arbor.com/content/13/6/159
