Facebook ads for a tree surgeon in Peterborough: 27 replies and 4 jobs in three weeks

Ivan is a tree surgeon running his own Facebook ads with us. When we want to know how an account is really doing, we open the lead app and read every conversation one by one. This page is counted from that review, nothing else.

Who is Ivan and where does he work?

Ivan runs a tree surgery business covering Peterborough and Cambridgeshire. The enquiries in his lead app were for things like trees to come down, conifers and hedges to cut back or reduce, and branches hanging over from next door.

Enquiries reached him four ways: the form on his Facebook ads, Facebook Messenger, comments on his Facebook posts and phone calls.

This page doesn’t tell the story of his first weeks with us, and we don’t have figures from before the review. It’s a three-week snapshot, read in full.

What did we set up?

Ivan’s enquiries come from his own Facebook ads, made for tree work and shown to people in his area. We don’t take on another tree surgeon there, so the leads are his alone.

Each enquiry lands in the lead app on his phone with the name, number and job. Every one got an automatic text straight away asking how he could help with their trees and hedges.

Ivan also used the calendar in the app to book his visits. 9 appointments went into it across the three weeks.

What happened in those three weeks?

We didn’t look at the account again after 2 August for this page. So we can’t tell you whether the pine removal went ahead on the day, or what came of the quotes that were still open.

What did the numbers look like?

There were 89 conversations in his lead app over the 21 days. 73 were real people. The other 16 weren’t leads: spam messages, numbers that couldn’t take a text, people after something else entirely, and a couple of internal threads.

27 people replied with real tree work. Replied means the person sent their own message or answered a call, and the review quotes or describes what they said. Three more people sit under a heading in the review without their own words shown, so we left them out. This is the strict count.

37 people never replied to anything.

4 tree jobs were won. We only count a job where the conversations show it completed, paid, booked or agreed:

• a large conifer job near Godmanchester, completed on 30 July
• another job, completed and paid
• a pine removal for elderly neighbours, booked in the calendar for 10 August
• a quote that was agreed

The review lists two more jobs. One was done before the window started and one has notes that don’t agree with each other, so neither is in the 4. Anything sorted over WhatsApp or on the phone doesn’t show in the app either, and the review can only count what it can see.

What made the difference?

The calendar. Ivan put his visits in it, 9 across the three weeks, and the review said that habit is why several jobs got done. A visit in the calendar is harder to lose track of than one agreed in a text.

The review’s own verdict was that the lead flow and the closing both worked. The next win is in the follow-up: getting quotes back quickly to the people who’ve been visited, and giving the 37 who went quiet more than one chance to answer. That’s why follow-ups that keep going until people reply, then stop on their own, are part of what we set up for every client.

What does this mean for a tree surgeon in your area?

Ivan’s three weeks show the enquiries are real people with real trees. What turns them into jobs is the bit after: replying fast, booking the visit in the calendar and getting the quote back while they’re still keen.

If you want to see how that adds up for you, put your own numbers into the cost per job calculator. There’s more on where tree work comes from in how to get more tree surgery work, and on what reading 1,282 lead conversations taught us in are Facebook leads any good.

With Lead Wave you’re usually live within the hour, and the first enquiries usually arrive within 24 hours. We only take on one tree surgeon per area.