Landscapers: How Much Should You REALLY Spend on Facebook Ads? (Stop Guessing)

MATTHEW THIBEAU • July 4, 2025

If you're a landscaper trying to grow your business, chances are you've asked yourself this question at some point: “How much should I be spending on Facebook ads?”

Maybe you’ve heard some generic advice like: “Only spend 5% of your revenue on marketing.”

Or: “You need to invest at least $3,000 a month to see results.”

But the truth is—it depends.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to ad budgets. It’s entirely dependent on your current situation, your goals, and your capacity to handle more work.

In this blog, we’re going to walk you through a strategic way to determine exactly how much you should spend on Facebook ads—based on where you are in your business, what kind of work you want, and the growth targets you’ve set for yourself.

Step 1: Understand What Season You’re In

Before you even start crunching numbers, you need to get brutally honest about what phase of growth you're currently in. We like to call this understanding the “season” of your business.

If you're still in startup mode, just getting things off the ground and wearing all the hats, you’re probably trying to stretch every dollar. You may not have a ton of cash to throw at ads—and that’s totally fine.

During this stage, your priority might be to get scrappy with grassroots methods like flyers, knocking doors, and hustling for referrals while slowly testing lower-budget remarketing campaigns on Facebook.

On the other hand, if you’re in scale mode—meaning your systems are in place, you’ve got a team that can handle the work, and you have access to some capital—it’s time to get more aggressive.

That might look like putting real fuel behind your ad spend because you know you can handle the volume. In this phase, you're not just looking for "some" leads. You're actively building a machine that generates consistent, predictable revenue and supports your growth goals.

So, ask yourself: are you trying to build lean and stay super profitable right now? Or are you trying to scale fast and grab market share? Your budget needs to align with your season.

Step 2: Audit Your Current Marketing Spend

Before deciding how much more to spend, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at what you're already spending—and whether it’s doing anything for you.

We talk to landscapers all the time who are throwing money into a dozen different marketing channels, hoping something sticks. Maybe they’ve been paying for SEO for a year without seeing real results, or they’re sponsoring a local event every summer out of habit because they always have. But when you ask them what kind of return they're getting, the answer is usually a shrug.

You’ve got to treat your marketing spend like an investment portfolio. If a stock underperforms for a year, you’d sell it off and put your money somewhere else.

Marketing is no different. If you're paying $1,000/month for a directory listing or content that hasn't driven a single sale in six months, that money could probably be reallocated to something more measurable and aggressive—like Facebook ads.

The point of this audit isn’t to shame your past decisions. It’s to make sure every dollar you spend going forward has a purpose. If something’s not producing ROI, cut it. Reinvest that budget into a strategy that gives you more control, faster feedback loops, and real lead volume.

Step 3: Use the 50/30 Rule to Reverse Engineer Your Budget

Here’s where we get tactical.

To figure out how much you should spend on Facebook ads, we use a simple but powerful method we call the 50/30 Rule. It’s based on two conversion benchmarks we consistently see across high-performing campaigns.

First, you should be booking at least 50% of the leads you get into in-person estimates. If you're generating 30 leads per month, about 15 of them should be turning into quotes.

Second, you should be closing roughly 30% of your estimates into actual jobs. That means if you’re doing 15 estimates a month, you should be closing at least 5 new jobs.

From there, we can reverse engineer the ad budget. Let’s say your average job is worth $10,000 and you want to add an extra $50,000 in revenue per month. That means you need 5 new jobs. Using the 50/30 Rule, you’ll need to generate 30 leads to book 15 estimates and close 5 jobs.

If your average cost per lead is around $30 to $50 (which is what we typically see with Facebook lead forms), you’ll need to spend around $1,500/month in ad spend to hit that goal.

This is why we always say: your ad budget should be based on your revenue goal—not some arbitrary percentage. If you know your close rates and your average job value, you can make data-driven decisions that take the guesswork out of your marketing.

Step 4: Understand the Realities of Scaling

Once you’ve nailed down your baseline budget and started getting results, it’s tempting to just throw more money at the ads and expect the same outcome—but this is where things get tricky.

When you scale your Facebook ad spend beyond a certain point (usually $5,000/month and up), you start dealing with something called ad fatigue. That’s when your audience starts seeing the same ads over and over again, and they stop responding. Your cost per lead goes up, and your results flatten or decline unless you stay ahead of it.

That’s why scaling doesn’t just mean spending more. It means investing more into ad management. You’ll need to create new content more frequently, test different hooks, rotate creative weekly (instead of bi-weekly), and keep an eye on your performance metrics to catch problems early. The bigger your budget, the faster Facebook burns through your content.

And this is the part that most contractors don’t expect: you can’t “set and forget” your ads. The more you scale, the more hands-on you or your marketing team needs to be. Otherwise, you're spending more to get less.

So, if you're planning to scale up to $10K or $20K a month in ad spend, know that the content workload and creative testing will need to scale alongside it. That’s how you keep results consistent as you grow.

Final Thoughts

Determining how much you should spend on Facebook ads isn’t about copying what another contractor is doing or guessing based on a percentage of revenue. It’s about taking a strategic approach grounded in your business goals, your capacity, and the actual math of your close rates and average job size.

Start by understanding where your business is at today. Then audit where your current marketing dollars are going. Once that’s clear, use the 50/30 Rule to map out your goals and reverse engineer the ad spend needed to get there. And if you're scaling, be ready to invest in better content and more frequent creative refreshes to avoid fatigue and keep your costs low.

When done right, Facebook ads can be one of the fastest, most controllable ways to add predictable revenue to your landscaping business. But you need to treat it like a real investment, not just a flyer in the wind.

If you’re clear about what you want—and you’re willing to do the work—you’ll know exactly how much to spend.

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