Facebook ads brought a Stirling tree surgeon £5,225 of work from £1,167

Facebook ads for a Stirling tree surgeon do not have to be a leap of faith. Gillon Staley runs Staleys Tree Solutions out of Old Plean, just south of Stirling, and from £1,167 of Facebook ad spend his own job tracker shows £5,225 of tree work sold, about eight weeks of spend at £20 a day. Here is the campaign we built, the three decisions that made it pay, and what it tells you about running Facebook ads for a local trade.

Most trades we talk to carry the same worry about Facebook. They have watched the clicks and the likes go nowhere, and they want to know whether the money comes back as actual work, or whether it only buys attention from people who were never going to lift the phone. Gillon came to us for his website and his Google ranking first. Once that was working he put it in a public recommendation, before a single ad had run: "we are moving into ads as he has been consistent with what he can deliver and how it's delivered." The ads were the next step. This is what they have done.

What the Facebook ads brought in for a Stirling tree surgeon

We run his Facebook ads on a steady £20 a day. Set that against the result and the sum is plain: about eight weeks of that spend comes to £1,167, and against it Gillon's own job tracker shows £5,225 of tree work sold. On a budget most owners would not think twice about, the account has paid for itself several times over.

The three decisions that made the ads pay

The result came from three decisions, and each one is something you can hold your own ads up against.

First, we pointed the ads at the people who could actually use him. The campaign runs on Facebook lead forms, so the enquiry happens inside Facebook with nothing to download and no website to wait for, and we aimed it at homeowners across Stirling, Falkirk and the rest of central Scotland. Those are the people with mature trees and the money to have them dealt with properly, and they sit inside the patch Gillon can reach from Old Plean. A tree surgeon has no reason to pay to be seen two hundred miles away, so we did not let him.

Second, we built the ads around the one thing he offers, said in plain words: a free on-site survey and an honest quote from Gillon himself, with five million pounds of insurance behind every job. Owner-led, so the man who quotes the work is the man who turns up to do it, and no call centre in between. The job of the ad is to get the right homeowner to put their hand up, and a straight promise from the bloke with the chainsaw does that far better than anything dressed up.

Third, we kept the budget on the ads that were booking surveys and took it off the ones that were not. Some of the angles we ran brought enquiries in week after week and some did not, so the money followed the work. That is the difference between an account that drifts and one that earns, and it is the part most owners never reach, because nobody is watching it week to week.

What this means if you are weighing up Facebook ads

If you run a local trade and you spend on Facebook ads, or you are turning the idea over, the useful part here has nothing to do with tree surgery. It is the shape of the thing. A modest budget, aimed at the right patch and built around a real offer that someone actually manages, is what turns ad spend into booked work.

Cost per click and likes are not the number that pays your wages. What pays your wages is how much work came back for what you spent, and whether the person running your ads can show you that figure the moment you ask.

Where these numbers come from

The spend is straight off the Facebook ad account we run for him. The £5,225 is from Gillon's own job tracker, where he logs the work the ads bring in, read on 29 September 2026. If whoever runs your ads cannot show you those two numbers together, that is the first thing worth sorting.

If you are a local trade spending on Facebook ads and you have no clear answer on what that spend has actually brought back, book a call and we will read the account with you, week by week, and show you exactly what the money is doing.