Most solar installers in Australia set their marketing budget the wrong way round. They look at whatever cash is left after wages, vans, panels, and the tax bill, then spend that on leads. When a month goes quiet, marketing is the first line cut, which guarantees the next month is quieter still. The result is a business that feels permanently at the mercy of the season, the rebate cycle, and whichever aggregator is selling the cheapest leads that week.
The installers who grow predictably do the opposite. They decide how many installs they want next quarter, work backwards to the spend that produces them, and protect that number when things wobble. Budget becomes an input to growth rather than a leftover. This guide gives you the framework to set that number, split it across channels, and avoid the four mistakes that quietly drain solar marketing budgets.
Most established Australian solar installers should budget between seven and twelve per cent of revenue on marketing, but that percentage is a sanity check, not a plan. The number that actually matters is your cost per booked install measured against your gross margin per install. If a customer is worth AUD $2,500 in margin and it costs you AUD $700 to book the job, you should spend until that ratio stops working, regardless of what the percentage says. Set the budget from unit economics first, then confirm it sits inside a sensible revenue band.
Budget from unit economics, not from a percentage. Work out your cost per booked install and your margin per install, then spend up to the point where that ratio stops paying. As a cross-check, sub $2M installers usually run ten to fifteen per cent of revenue, $2-10M growth firms eight to twelve per cent, and $10M+ established players six to nine per cent. Protect SEO and brand when cash gets tight, because those are the lines that quietly stop the long-term cost per lead from rising.
Why should solar installers budget from unit economics rather than a percentage of revenue?
Percentage-of-revenue budgeting is everywhere because it is easy. You take last year’s turnover, pick a number that feels reasonable, and that becomes the marketing pot. It works fine for a stable business selling a stable product to a stable market. Solar is none of those things.
The problem is that a percentage budget is backward looking and blind to opportunity. If your cost per booked install drops because a new offer is converting, the percentage tells you to keep spending the same when you should spend more. Revenue is the output you are trying to grow, so anchoring spend to it creates a lag that punishes good months and hides bad ones.
Unit-economics budgeting flips this. You start with two numbers: the gross margin you keep on an average install, and the all-in cost to book that install. The gap between them is your headroom. As long as a marketing channel produces booked jobs inside that headroom at the volume you can actually install, you fund it. The percentage of revenue it ends up consuming is a result you read afterwards, not a rule you set beforehand.
To run this properly you need clean numbers flowing back from your CRM and field team into your ad platforms, which is why GA4 conversion tracking and offline-conversion import are not optional. If you cannot tell Google which clicks became signed contracts, you are budgeting on lead volume, and lead volume is the metric most likely to flatter a bad month. We cover the difference between cheap leads and profitable ones in our piece on solar lead quality versus quantity.
What numbers do you actually need before you set a budget?
Five figures unlock the whole framework, and most installers can pull four of them from existing records in an afternoon. Average system value and gross margin come straight from your accounts. Lead-to-quote and quote-to-install conversion rates come from your CRM or, failing that, from your quoting tool and job board.
The fifth figure, cost per booked install by channel, is the one most installers cannot see, because spend lives in ad platforms while the install lives in the CRM and nobody has joined them. That join is the single highest-value piece of marketing plumbing you can build. Once you have it, every budget decision becomes arithmetic instead of argument. The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes dwelling and renovation data that helps you sanity-check demand in your region.
What percentage of revenue do Australian solar companies actually spend on marketing?
Across the Australian solar accounts we work with, marketing spend as a share of GST-exclusive revenue lands in a fairly narrow set of bands once you control for company stage. Newer installers spend the most as a percentage because they are buying market presence from zero. Established firms spend the least as a percentage because brand equity, repeat work, and referrals do part of the job for free.
The table below is the cross-check, not the target. Use it to confirm your unit-economics budget is not wildly out of line with your stage. If you are a $4M installer planning to spend two per cent of revenue, something is wrong, because that almost never buys enough volume to hold position against competitors who are spending four times as much in the same postcodes.
| Company stage (annual revenue, ex-GST) | Typical marketing spend (% of revenue) | Indicative annual spend (AUD) |
|---|---|---|
| Startup / sub $2M | 10-15% | $80,000-$300,000 |
| Growth / $2M-$10M | 8-12% | $160,000-$1,200,000 |
| Established / $10M-$25M | 6-9% | $600,000-$2,250,000 |
| Scale / $25M+ | 5-8% | $1,250,000+ |
Two things move you up within a band. The first is how competitive your metro is, with Sydney and Melbourne running materially higher cost per lead than regional Queensland or South Australia. The second is how aggressive your growth target is, because pulling forward installs always costs more per job at the margin. We break down the geographic spread in our 2026 solar cost per lead benchmarks.
Why do startups spend a higher percentage than established installers?
A new installer has no brand searches, no review base, and no referral flywheel. Every single lead has to be bought, usually through paid search and aggregators, which are the most expensive channels per lead. There is no organic cushion to dilute the average, so the percentage of revenue going to marketing is high by necessity.
An established installer has the opposite profile. A meaningful share of their pipeline arrives through people searching the business name, through Google Business Profile, through past customers, and through organic content that ranks. Those leads cost almost nothing at the margin, so the same install volume requires a smaller percentage of revenue. The catch is that this cushion only exists if the established installer kept investing in SEO and brand during the years when it was tempting to cut them.
How should the channel split change as a solar installer matures?
Where you put the money matters as much as how much you spend. Solar has three quirks that should shape every channel decision. The consideration window is long, often six to twelve weeks from first click to signed contract. Buyers collect multiple quotes, so you are rarely the only installer in the conversation. And the install value is high, which means a single won job can justify a lot of upstream spend.
Those quirks argue for a portfolio, not a single channel. Paid search captures people already shopping. Performance Max and Meta build the consideration set earlier and stay visible across the long window. SEO, Google Business Profile, and reviews lower the cost of every future lead. The table below shows how we typically weight the split by stage across our solar accounts.
| Channel | Startup / sub $2M | Growth / $2-10M | Established / $10M+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Ads (Google / Bing) | 40% | 30% | 22% |
| Performance Max | 10% | 12% | 12% |
| Meta (Facebook / Instagram) | 15% | 18% | 18% |
| SEO & content | 10% | 14% | 18% |
| Google Business Profile & local | 8% | 8% | 8% |
| Website & conversion (CRO) | 9% | 8% | 7% |
| Marketing ops & nurture (CRM, email, SMS) | 5% | 6% | 7% |
| Brand (sponsorship, OOH, video) | 3% | 4% | 8% |
Notice what shifts as the company grows. The paid-search share falls from forty per cent to around twenty-two per cent, not because search stops working but because the cheaper channels start carrying more of the load. SEO and brand roughly double their share. The startup loads up on search and aggregators to buy immediate volume, then gradually rebalances toward channels that compound, which is the whole point of maturing as a marketer.
Why does paid search dominate the early budget?
Search captures intent at the moment it exists. Someone typing “solar installer Brisbane” or “13kW system cost” is in the market right now, and a new installer with no organic presence has no other way to reach them. That immediacy is worth paying for, which is why early-stage budgets lean heavily on Google Ads for solar companies.
The discipline is to keep that spend efficient as it scales. A poor Quality Score quietly inflates your cost per click, so tightening ad relevance and landing-page experience pays for itself, as we explain in Quality Score explained. The most common way early budgets evaporate is described in why Google Ads fail, and almost all of those mistakes are cheaper to avoid than to fix.
Why do SEO and brand grow their share over time?
SEO and brand are the only channels where this month’s spend lowers next year’s cost per lead. A page that ranks for “off-grid solar Perth” keeps producing leads at near-zero marginal cost long after it was written. A recognised brand name means more people search you directly and convert at a higher rate because trust is already established before the first call.
That compounding is why established installers can run a lower percentage of revenue overall. They are harvesting investments made years earlier. Starve SEO and brand and the harvest stops, usually about twelve to eighteen months later when paid costs creep up and nobody can work out why. Our overview of SEO for solar companies and local SEO for solar installers sets out where to start.
How do you tie the budget to cost per booked install and a growth target?
This is where the framework becomes a plan you can defend to a partner or a board. Start with the growth target, expressed in installs, not dollars. Say you installed 400 systems last year and want 520 this year, a thirty per cent increase. That extra 120 installs is what your incremental budget has to produce.
Now bring in the unit economics. If your blended cost per booked install across channels is AUD $650 and you want 520 total, the arithmetic floor is 520 multiplied by $650, which is AUD $338,000. But the marginal install always costs more than the average, because you exhaust the cheapest demand first and then pay up for the next slice. A sensible plan budgets the base volume at the blended rate and the growth volume at a higher marginal rate, often twenty to forty per cent above blended.
So 400 base installs at $650 is $260,000, and 120 growth installs at $850 marginal is $102,000, for a total of around $362,000. Check that against the revenue-band table. If 520 installs at an average $9,000 system is AUD $4.68M revenue, then $362,000 is roughly 7.7 per cent, comfortably inside the growth band. The plan is internally consistent, and you can see exactly which assumption to revisit if it isn’t.
What target cost per booked install should solar installers aim for?
There is no universal number, because it depends entirely on your margin per install. The rule is that your cost per booked install should leave enough gross margin to cover overheads and still return a profit you are happy with. As a rough guide across our accounts, residential installers keeping AUD $2,000-$3,500 margin per job can usually sustain a cost per booked install of AUD $500-$900, while battery and larger commercial jobs with higher margins can carry more.
Watch the channel mix inside that blended number. Aggregator leads can look cheap per lead but expensive per booked install once you account for shared, multi-quoted prospects, which we unpack in our analysis of aggregator leads versus direct. Direct leads usually cost more upfront but convert better and produce a customer you actually own.
How should seasonality and rebate changes shape a solar marketing budget?
Solar demand in Australia is not flat across the year, and pretending it is wrecks budgets. Enquiry volume typically lifts ahead of summer and around the end of the financial year, then softens in the depths of winter in the southern states. The annual step-down in the small-scale technology certificate value, which the Clean Energy Regulator administers, also creates predictable bursts of urgency as households move before the deeming period shrinks each January.
The mistake is to chase those swings with a budget that rises and falls in lockstep. You end up bidding hardest when everyone else is bidding hardest, paying peak prices for peak demand. A smarter pattern holds a steady base budget that keeps SEO, brand, and always-on search running, then layers a seasonality reserve on top that you deploy into the specific windows where conversion rates are highest.
Set that reserve aside at the start of the year, ten to fifteen per cent of the annual budget held back, rather than scrambling for cash when the busy season arrives. The 2025 changes to the national battery rebate under the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, detailed by DCCEEW, are a perfect example of a demand event worth holding reserve for, and we cover the marketing angle in our guide to solar battery marketing in Australia.
Should the budget be fixed or flexible?
Both, in defined proportions. Roughly seventy per cent of the annual number should be fixed and protected, covering the always-on channels and the team or agency that runs them. This is the part you do not touch in a slow month, because cutting it is what turns a slow month into a slow quarter.
The remaining thirty per cent is flexible. It funds the seasonality reserve, testing new channels or creative, and pressing the advantage when a campaign is clearly outperforming. The discipline is to flex the flexible portion and leave the fixed portion alone, rather than the far more common habit of cutting everything proportionally the moment revenue dips.
Is it cheaper to run solar marketing in-house or through an agency?
The honest answer is that the cost structures are different rather than one being universally cheaper. An in-house team gives you control, product knowledge, and no agency margin, but you carry fixed salaries, on-costs, software licences, and the risk that one person leaving takes half your capability with them. A competent in-house solar marketer in a capital city costs AUD $90,000-$130,000 plus on-costs before you have spent a dollar on tools or media.
An agency converts much of that into a variable cost and gives you a team rather than an individual, with platform expertise across many solar accounts. The trade is a management fee and less day-to-day control. For most installers under AUD $10M revenue, a hybrid works best: one in-house owner who holds the strategy, brand, and CRM, plus a specialist agency running the paid and SEO execution.
The wrong comparison is fee versus salary in isolation. Compare total cost to acquire a booked install under each model, including the cost of slow execution and missed seasons. If you are weighing options, our rundown of the best solar marketing agencies in Australia sets out what good looks like, and the Uprise solar marketing service page explains how we structure engagements.
What are the most common solar marketing budget mistakes?
Four mistakes account for most of the wasted spend we see when we audit a new solar account. None of them are exotic. All of them are avoidable once you can see the right numbers.
Mistake one: underfunding to survive a slow month
When enquiries dip, the instinct is to cut marketing to protect cash. This is the single most expensive reflex in the industry. You cut the spend that fills the pipeline, the pipeline empties, the next month is worse, and you cut again. Holding the fixed budget steady through a soft patch is uncomfortable but it is what breaks the cycle, which is why the seventy per cent fixed allocation exists.
Mistake two: over-indexing on one channel
Plenty of installers run almost their entire budget through Meta or through a single aggregator because it worked once. Concentration feels efficient until the channel’s cost per lead jumps or the platform changes its rules, and then your entire pipeline drops at once. A spread across search, social, and organic, as set out in our comparison of Google Ads versus Meta for solar installers, is insurance you only appreciate the week a channel breaks.
Mistake three: cutting brand and SEO first
Brand and SEO are the easiest lines to cut because nothing visibly breaks the next day. The damage shows up twelve to eighteen months later as a slowly rising cost per lead that no one connects back to the decision. These are the compounding investments, so cutting them first is exactly backwards. Protect them and trim paid testing budget instead.
Mistake four: spending blind with no offline-conversion feedback
If your ad platforms only know about form fills and calls, not which of those became signed contracts, you are optimising toward leads rather than installs. The platform happily buys you more of the cheap leads that never convert. Feeding booked-install data back via offline conversion import is the fix, and it is the foundation of everything in our solar lead generation guide. The ACCC also expects solar advertising claims to be substantiated, so accurate tracking doubles as compliance hygiene.
What have we seen across Uprise solar accounts?
Across the Australian solar installers we manage, the pattern is consistent enough to plan around. Installers who moved from percentage-of-revenue budgeting to unit-economics budgeting and held a protected fixed allocation typically saw cost per booked install fall by fifteen to twenty-five per cent within two quarters, mostly from cutting the channels that produced leads but not contracts.
One growth-stage installer in the AUD $5-7M band came to us spending almost everything on aggregator and Meta leads at a blended cost per booked install north of AUD $1,100. By rebalancing toward branded and non-branded search, rebuilding tracking so the platforms optimised on signed jobs, and reallocating roughly fifteen per cent of budget into SEO and Google Business Profile, the blended cost per booked install settled around AUD $720 over nine months while volume rose.
We also see the cost of cutting. An established installer that paused SEO and content for three quarters to fund a paid push watched its share of free branded and organic leads erode, and within a year the blended cost per lead had drifted up by close to thirty per cent. The lesson repeats: the channels that feel safest to cut are usually doing the quiet heavy lifting. These are observed ranges across our portfolio, stated GST-exclusive, and your results will depend on margin, market, and offer.
How should you phase a budget increase rather than spending it all at once?
If the framework tells you to spend more, resist the urge to switch it on overnight. Ad platforms and your own sales team both have a digestion rate. Dump fifty per cent more budget into Google Ads in a week and you will mostly buy more expensive, lower-intent clicks while your bidding algorithms thrash, and your installers will drown in leads they cannot quote fast enough.
Phase the increase in steps of fifteen to twenty-five per cent, holding each step long enough to read the effect on cost per booked install, usually four to six weeks given the long solar consideration window. If the ratio holds, take the next step. If it deteriorates, you have found your current ceiling and can divert the next tranche into a different channel or into fixing conversion on your site, an area covered in the new guide to solar website design that converts.
Throughout the ramp, keep your measurement honest. Tie every dollar back to booked installs and revenue, not to leads, using the discipline in our piece on solar marketing ROI measurement. The Uprise Google Ads service and our SEO service are both built to scale spend this way, in steps that protect your ratio rather than gambling it.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a new solar installer spend on marketing?
A startup or sub AUD $2M installer typically needs to spend ten to fifteen per cent of revenue on marketing, because every lead has to be bought and there is no organic or brand cushion yet. In absolute terms that often means AUD $80,000 to AUD $300,000 a year, weighted heavily toward paid search to capture buyers who are actively shopping. Confirm the number against your cost per booked install rather than trusting the percentage alone.
What percentage of revenue do solar companies spend on marketing in Australia?
It depends on stage. Established installers above AUD $10M revenue commonly run six to nine per cent, growth-stage firms between AUD $2M and $10M run eight to twelve per cent, and startups under AUD $2M run ten to fifteen per cent. These are cross-checks on a budget set from unit economics, not targets in themselves.
What is a good cost per booked install for a solar company?
There is no universal figure because it depends on your margin per job. As a guide across our accounts, residential installers keeping AUD $2,000 to $3,500 margin per install can usually sustain a cost per booked install of AUD $500 to $900. Battery and commercial jobs with higher margins can carry a higher cost per booked install while still being profitable.
Should I budget marketing as a percentage of revenue or by unit economics?
For solar, use unit economics as the primary method and the percentage of revenue as a sanity check. Percentage budgeting lags reality and ignores opportunity, while unit economics ties spend to the margin and volume you can actually install. Set the budget from cost per booked install versus margin, then confirm it sits inside a sensible revenue band for your stage.
How much of a solar marketing budget should go to SEO versus paid ads?
Early on, paid search dominates at around forty per cent of spend while SEO sits near ten per cent, because new installers need immediate intent capture. As the business matures the SEO and content share roughly doubles to around eighteen per cent while paid search falls toward twenty-two per cent, because organic and brand begin carrying more of the load at a far lower marginal cost.
Should solar installers cut marketing during a slow month?
Cutting the fixed marketing budget during a slow month is the most common and most expensive mistake in the industry, because it empties the pipeline and deepens the slowdown. Keep roughly seventy per cent of the budget fixed and protected, and flex only the remaining thirty per cent. Use a seasonality reserve set aside at the start of the year rather than slashing always-on channels.
Is it cheaper to hire in-house or use a solar marketing agency?
Neither is universally cheaper, because the cost structures differ. In-house gives control but carries fixed salaries of AUD $90,000 to $130,000 plus on-costs and key-person risk, while an agency converts much of that to a variable fee with a broader team. For installers under AUD $10M a hybrid model often works best: one in-house owner for strategy and brand, plus a specialist agency for paid and SEO execution.
How do I scale my solar marketing budget without wasting money?
Phase the increase in steps of fifteen to twenty-five per cent and hold each step for four to six weeks so you can read the effect on cost per booked install across the long solar consideration window. If the ratio holds, take the next step; if it deteriorates, you have found your ceiling and should redirect spend to another channel or to improving website conversion. Always measure against booked installs and revenue, never against lead volume alone.
