A reasonable garage door marketing budget is 5–10% of gross revenue for an established shop holding its ground, and 10–15% when you're pushing to grow. That's the planning range contractors and trade advisors commonly use — treat it as a starting point, not a law.
The number that matters more than the percentage is what each dollar buys: a ringing phone. Everything you spend on ads, signs, or SEO is really buying calls. So the budget conversation has two halves — how much to spend, and how many of those calls you actually answer and book.
This article gives you the ranges, where the money usually goes, and a worked example. For the bigger picture of how all the channels fit together, see the complete garage door marketing guide.
Pick the row that matches where your shop is:
These ranges assume a normal competitive market. In a big metro with heavy ad competition, the same money buys fewer calls, and you may need to sit at the top of the range just to move the needle.
For most repair shops, the budget splits across a short list:
Say your shop grosses $600,000 a year and you want to grow. You set the budget at 8% — $48,000 a year, or $4,000 a month. (This is an example; plug in your own numbers.)
A simple split:
Now the other half of the math. Say the $3,000 in ads produces 60 calls at a $50 cost per call — a reasonable planning figure in many markets. If you answer and book half of them, that's 30 jobs. At a $350 average ticket, that's $10,500 in revenue from $3,000 in spend. Healthy.
But if you miss a quarter of those 60 calls — after-hours, weekends, you're on a ladder — you lose roughly 7–8 booked jobs, or about $2,600 in revenue, on money you already spent. Same budget, worse result, and the leak isn't the ads.
Track one number per channel: cost per booked job. Not clicks, not impressions — booked jobs.
Cost per booked job = what you spent ÷ jobs you can trace back to that channel. Ask every caller "how'd you hear about us?" and keep a tally. If ads cost you $3,000 and produced 30 booked jobs, that's $100 a job. Compare that against your average ticket and margin, and the budget question answers itself.
Review it monthly. Kill what's expensive, feed what's working, and don't judge any channel on less than 60–90 days of data unless it's obviously broken. If you're working with a tight budget, the tactics in garage door marketing ideas that work on a small budget stretch every dollar further.
Set the budget as a share of revenue — 5–10% to hold, 10–15% to grow — and judge it on cost per booked job, not on activity. Then protect the spend: a marketing dollar that ends in a missed call is wasted, and that's the leak most shops never measure.
Call the live demo and have Ava call you now — hear exactly what your customers will hear when they call your shop.