What Guides Spend on Marketing: The Data
Builds guide sites for a livingPublished July 24, 2026Last updated July 26, 202639 min read
- 48 CFR 31.205-1(b) defines advertising by control over the form and content, the media, and the timing of what appears, all three together.
- 31.205-1(c) includes the applicable portion of salaries in the cost, which is the half of a guide's marketing spend that is never counted.
- Uncontrolled coverage is valuable and is not advertising: it cannot be bought, scaled or relied upon, and it is invisible in any spend figure.
- Count four lines: media cost, purchased services, tools and subscriptions, and your own hours valued at what buying the same work would cost.
- Count discounts and free days too, since money given up to produce a booking is a marketing cost in every sense except the accounting one.
- Record the absolute figure and the percentage of revenue, and let only the absolute figure drive decisions.
Federal cost principles define advertising precisely, and the definition turns on control. The use of media to promote the sale of products or services, regardless of the medium employed, when the advertiser has control over the form and content of what will appear, the media in which it will appear, and when it will appear.
Three controls, all of which have to be present. Which immediately disqualifies a great deal of what guides think of as marketing, and it explains why any figure claiming to describe marketing spend in this trade is measuring an undefined quantity. No spend figure or percentage is asserted anywhere on this page. What follows is the definition, what it excludes, and how to work out your own number in a way that would survive being asked about. Related pages sit under the guide industry data hub.
| Activity | Form | Placement | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid search advertisement | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Your own website | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A client's social post about their day | No | No | No |
| A magazine feature about your water | No | No | No |
What does the definition require?
Media, promotion, and control over three separate things.
Section 31.205-1(b) of Title 48 defines advertising as the use of media to promote the sale of products or services, regardless of the medium employed, when the advertiser has control over the form and content of what will appear, the media in which it will appear, and when it will appear.
It lists media including conventions, exhibits, free goods, samples, magazines, newspapers, trade papers, direct mail, dealer cards, window displays, outdoor advertising, radio and television.
Paragraph (a) defines the wider category of public relations as all functions and activities dedicated to maintaining, protecting and enhancing the image of a concern or its products, or to maintaining or promoting reciprocal understanding and favourable relations with the public at large or any segment of it.
Which places advertising inside public relations rather than beside it, and treats the two as a spectrum rather than as separate budgets.
Section 31.205-1 is carried on the eCFR.
Why no aggregate figure exists for this trade is set out in the methodology piece.
What does the cost definition include?
Labour, which is the part everybody leaves out.
Paragraph (c) provides that public relations and advertising costs include the costs of media time and space, purchased services performed by outside organisations, and the applicable portion of salaries, travel and fringe benefits of employees engaged in those functions.
The applicable portion of salaries is the clause that matters, because it treats the time spent on the activity as part of its cost rather than as free.
Which is exactly what a guide computing their own marketing spend never does, and it is why the numbers people quote about themselves are systematically too low.
An operation spending nothing on advertisements and forty hours a winter on its website and social accounts has a marketing cost, and the cost is forty hours.
Valuing that time at anything realistic frequently produces a larger figure than the cash spend it was compared against.
Which changes the conclusion of every comparison between doing it yourself and paying somebody.
That comparison is worked through in the time audit piece.
What the labour clause does to a self-reported figure. An operation reporting $2,400 of annual marketing spend, being a website subscription and some boosted posts, and also spending fifty hours a year on the same activity. At a notional $60 an hour of the operator's own time that is $3,000 of labour, so the honest total is $5,400 rather than $2,400. Every figure here is a stated assumption, and the point is the ratio rather than the numbers: the unpriced half is frequently the larger half.
Why does the control test matter?
Because it separates what you bought from what you were given.
A magazine writing about your fishery, a client posting a photograph, or a guide being mentioned in somebody's video are all valuable and none of them is advertising by this definition.
Which is not a semantic point: the two categories behave completely differently, cost completely differently, and cannot be budgeted the same way.
Controlled placements can be bought, scaled, stopped and measured, which is why any figure about marketing spend is really a figure about that category.
Uncontrolled coverage cannot be bought and cannot be relied upon, and an operation whose enquiries come mainly from it has a marketing cost close to zero and no ability to increase output.
Which is a real strategic position rather than a failure, and it is invisible in any spend figure.
Two operations with identical bookings and opposite cost structures would report the same revenue and completely different marketing spend.
Where the enquiries actually come from is examined in the channel share piece.
No marketing spend figure appears here. Nothing of the kind was found in any source consulted, no percentage of revenue is offered, and no range has been estimated from adjacent trades. The cost principles described govern the allowability of costs on federal contracts and impose nothing on a guiding business; the definitions are quoted because they are unusually precise, not because they apply. Nothing on this page is financial or accounting advice.
What does the government refuse to pay for?
Most advertising, which is the surprising part.
Paragraph (d) provides that the only allowable advertising costs are those specifically required by contract or arising from contract requirements and exclusively for acquiring scarce items for contract performance or disposing of scrap or surplus materials; costs of activities to promote sales of products normally sold to the government, including trade shows containing a significant effort to promote exports; and costs allowable under a separate provision.
Which is a very short list, and it means ordinary promotional advertising is not an allowable cost on a federal contract.
The same paragraph excludes, even within the permitted trade show category, the costs of memorabilia such as models, gifts and souvenirs, alcoholic beverages, entertainment, and physical facilities used primarily for entertainment rather than product promotion.
The memorabilia exclusion is worth noticing, because it draws the same line between a gift and an advertisement that the tax rules draw elsewhere.
None of which reaches a guide, and all of which demonstrates that the boundaries here have been argued over carefully by people with money at stake.
The gift version of that boundary is set out in the client gifts piece.
So what should a guide actually count?
Four lines, and one of them is hours.
Media cost, meaning anything paid to place something where you controlled the form, the placement and the timing.
Purchased services, meaning anybody paid to make or manage that material.
Tools and subscriptions, meaning the website, the booking system's marketing features, the email platform and anything similar.
And hours, recorded honestly, being your own time on all of the above.
Which produces a number that can be compared against bookings, against previous years and against the cost of paying somebody to do it instead.
None of the four is available from any published source and all four are available from your own records in an afternoon.
What to do with the resulting figure is set out in the marketing cost piece.
How should the hours be valued?
At what the time would otherwise have earned, which is usually higher than people pick.
The instinct is to value off-season hours at nothing, on the grounds that there was no guiding to do and the time was free.
Which is defensible for a genuinely idle winter and wrong for anybody who could have been working, teaching, or doing anything else that pays.
The more useful valuation for a decision is what it would cost to buy the same work, since that is the actual alternative being weighed.
Where a competent person would charge a stated hourly rate for the same task, that rate is the honest number regardless of what your own time is worth.
Using it produces a figure that answers the question directly: is doing this yourself cheaper than paying for it, and by how much.
Most operations who run that calculation discover the website work is worth outsourcing and the writing is not, because the second requires knowledge nobody can buy.
Which is a genuinely useful conclusion and it is unavailable from any published figure.
Does the figure include the discounts?
It should, and almost nobody counts them.
A rate reduced to fill a shoulder day is a marketing cost in every sense except the accounting one, since money was given up to produce a booking.
Which means an operation running quiet-week promotions has a marketing spend considerably larger than its cash outlay, and the gap is invisible.
The same applies to a free half day offered as compensation, a discounted second trip, or anything else given up to secure or retain business.
Counting them turns an abstract question about marketing budget into a concrete one about where money actually went to produce bookings.
It also produces the uncomfortable comparison that matters, since the cost of a season of discounts frequently exceeds anything the operation was prepared to spend on advertising.
Which is worth knowing before the next discussion about whether advertising is affordable.
What discounting does to a rate generally is set out in the raising rates piece.
What about time spent on client communication?
Not marketing, and drawing the line matters.
Confirmations, weather calls and post-trip messages are service rather than promotion, and folding them into a marketing figure inflates it until the figure means nothing.
Which is a real risk in a trade where almost everything an operator does touches a client, and it is why the control test is useful.
Where you control the form, the placement and the timing of something addressed to people who are not yet clients, that is marketing.
Where it is addressed to somebody who has already booked, it is service, however much it also helps retention.
The boundary cases are the retention messages, and the honest answer is that they belong in a third category rather than being forced into either.
Recording them separately keeps both other figures meaningful and costs nothing.
What those messages actually are is set out in the winter email piece.
Should it be expressed as a percentage of revenue?
Only alongside the absolute figure, and the percentage is the less useful one.
A percentage is attractive because it appears comparable, and it is exactly the appearance of comparability that makes it dangerous in a trade with no benchmark.
It also moves for reasons that have nothing to do with marketing, since a good season lowers the ratio without anybody spending less.
Which means the percentage is a poor control variable and a worse target, and setting spend as a fixed share of revenue produces the least spending in the year that needed the most.
The absolute figure, tracked against bookings from each source, answers the question that matters, which is whether the money produced anything.
Both belong in the annual review and only one of them should drive a decision.
How to attribute bookings to sources is set out in the marketing report piece.
Does the figure need to be big?
No, and the assumption that it does causes real damage.
An operation with a full calendar and a two-year waiting list has no reason to spend anything, and a spend figure of zero is the correct answer rather than a failure.
Which is worth stating because the search for a benchmark is frequently driven by a suspicion that one is underspending, and the suspicion is often unfounded.
The question that determines the right figure is not what others spend but whether your calendar has gaps you would like filled and at what price.
An operation with fifteen unsold days in the shoulder has a concrete target, and the arithmetic of whether spending is worthwhile follows directly from the day rate.
An operation with no gaps has no target, and any spend is either brand building or waste depending on a much longer time horizon.
Which is a genuine strategic choice rather than a number to be looked up.
The capacity arithmetic behind it is set out in the income model piece.
What changes when somebody else is paid to do it?
The figure becomes visible, which is most of the benefit.
An operation paying an outside party has a cash number it can see, a set of deliverables and something to hold against results.
Which is a considerable improvement on an unpriced winter, independently of whether the outside party does the work better.
The visibility also changes behaviour, since an invoice provokes a question about output that fifty of your own hours never will.
What it costs is the knowledge, since nobody outside the operation knows the water, the clients or the season the way the operator does.
Which suggests the split most operations eventually reach: buy the production and keep the content, because the second is the part only you can supply.
Getting that split right is worth more than the size of either figure.
Why is the figure unavailable in aggregate?
Because nobody is required to report it and the definition is unfixed.
Marketing spend is not reported to any authority by a self-employed guide, does not appear in any regulatory filing, and is not aggregated anywhere.
Which means any figure would have to come from a survey, and a survey would have to fix a definition that the trade does not share.
One operator counting only advertisements and another counting a website, a photographer and their own winter are answering different questions.
Which is the same structural problem this cluster keeps finding: the absence is not a gap somebody forgot to fill but a consequence of how information is produced.
An honest survey would have to publish its definition alongside its figure, and almost none do.
The standards such a survey should meet are described in the methodology piece.
What does the answer usually look like?
Two shapes, and most operations are one of them.
The first is an operation spending almost nothing in cash and a great deal in hours, typically a guide maintaining their own site and social accounts through the winter.
The second is an operation spending real money on placement and very little of its own time, typically because somebody is paid to run it.
Both are coherent and the failure mode is the middle, where an operation spends moderately on both and manages neither, producing a cost with no accountable output.
Which is worth checking directly, since drifting into the middle happens gradually and is not a decision anybody makes.
The diagnostic is whether you could say, for each line of spend, what it produced last season, and the middle case cannot.
Where it cannot, the answer is to move deliberately to one shape or the other rather than to reduce everything proportionally.
What the accountable version looks like is set out in the marketing report piece.
Where do spend figures go wrong?
Six ways, and unpriced hours is the first.
Counting cash only, which omits the half of the cost that is frequently larger.
Counting uncontrolled coverage as marketing, when it cannot be bought, scaled or relied upon.
Quoting a percentage of revenue as though it were comparable to anybody else's.
Setting spend as a fixed share of revenue, which spends least in the year that needed most.
Comparing your figure to a published one whose definition is unstated.
And reporting a total without being able to say what each line produced.
The attribution that fixes the last one is set out in the marketing report piece.
What is the working method?
Four lines, hours included, compared only to yourself.
Count media cost, purchased services, tools and subscriptions, and your own hours, valued at something realistic.
Apply the control test to decide what belongs in the first line: form, placement and timing, all three.
Record the absolute figure and the percentage of revenue, and let only the absolute figure drive decisions.
Track what each line produced in bookings, because a total with no attribution cannot be acted on.
Compare against your own prior years and against the cost of paying somebody else, which are the only two comparisons available.
Ignore any published figure whose definition of marketing spend is not stated, which is all of them.
The statutory basis for the cost principles is 41 U.S.C. 1303, with the section mirrored on govinfo.
The decision it should inform is set out in the marketing cost piece.
How this was checked. The definitions come from 48 CFR 31.205-1, read on the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations on 26 July 2026. Paragraph (a) defines public relations as all functions and activities dedicated to maintaining, protecting and enhancing the image of a concern or its products, or to maintaining or promoting reciprocal understanding and favorable relations with the public at large or any segment of the public, and states that the term includes activities associated with areas such as advertising and customer relations. Paragraph (b) defines advertising as the use of media to promote the sale of products or services and to accomplish the activities referred to in paragraph (d), regardless of the medium employed, when the advertiser has control over the form and content of what will appear, the media in which it will appear, and when it will appear, and lists advertising media including but not limited to conventions, exhibits, free goods, samples, magazines, newspapers, trade papers, direct mail, dealer cards, window displays, outdoor advertising, radio and television. Paragraph (c) provides that public relations and advertising costs include the costs of media time and space, purchased services performed by outside organizations, and the applicable portion of salaries, travel and fringe benefits of employees engaged in those functions and activities. Paragraph (d) provides that the only allowable advertising costs are those specifically required by contract or arising from requirements of Government contracts and exclusively for acquiring scarce items for contract performance or disposing of scrap or surplus materials acquired for contract performance; costs of activities to promote sales of products normally sold to the U.S. Government, including trade shows containing a significant effort to promote exports from the United States, which do not include the costs of memorabilia such as models, gifts and souvenirs, alcoholic beverages, entertainment, or physical facilities used primarily for entertainment rather than product promotion; and costs allowable in accordance with 48 CFR 31.205-34. The Federal Acquisition Regulation cost principles govern the allowability of costs on federal contracts and impose nothing on a guiding business. No marketing spend figure, percentage of revenue, range or benchmark for guided fishing is asserted anywhere on this page; nothing of the kind was found in any source consulted and nothing has been estimated from adjacent trades. The figures in the arithmetic panel are stated illustrative assumptions. Nothing here is financial or accounting advice.
If your booking calendar has more open weeks than you’d like, I’ll build you a free preview of your booking site before you pay a cent.
Get a free website previewWhat the control test excludes, why the unpriced hours are the larger half, and what to count instead
What does the definition require?
48 CFR 31.205-1(b) defines advertising as the use of media to promote the sale of products or services, regardless of the medium, when the advertiser has control over the form and content of what will appear, the media in which it will appear, and when it will appear. Three controls, all of which must be present. It lists media including conventions, exhibits, free goods, samples, magazines, newspapers, direct mail, window displays, outdoor advertising, radio and television.
What does the cost include?
31.205-1(c) includes the costs of media time and space, purchased services performed by outside organisations, and the applicable portion of salaries, travel and fringe benefits of employees engaged in those functions. The salaries clause is the one that matters: it treats time spent as part of the cost rather than as free, which is exactly what a guide computing their own spend never does.
Why does the control test matter?
Because it separates what you bought from what you were given. A magazine writing about your fishery or a client posting a photograph is valuable and is not advertising. Controlled placements can be bought, scaled, stopped and measured; uncontrolled coverage cannot be relied upon. Two operations with identical bookings and opposite cost structures report completely different marketing spend.
What should a guide count?
Four lines. Media cost, being anything paid to place something where you controlled form, placement and timing. Purchased services, being anybody paid to make or manage that material. Tools and subscriptions. And hours, recorded honestly and valued at what buying the same work would cost. None of the four is available from any published source and all four are in your own records.
Should discounts be counted?
Yes, and almost nobody does. A rate reduced to fill a shoulder day is a marketing cost in every sense except the accounting one, since money was given up to produce a booking. The same applies to a free half day offered as compensation or a discounted second trip. A season of discounts frequently exceeds anything the operation was prepared to spend on advertising, which is worth knowing before the next budget discussion.
Should it be a percentage of revenue?
Only alongside the absolute figure, and the percentage is the less useful one. It appears comparable, which is what makes it dangerous where no benchmark exists, and it moves for reasons unrelated to marketing since a good season lowers the ratio without anybody spending less. Setting spend as a fixed share produces the least spending in the year that needed the most.
Does the figure need to be large?
No, and assuming it does causes real damage. An operation with a full calendar has no reason to spend anything, and zero is the correct answer rather than a failure. What determines the right figure is whether your calendar has gaps you would like filled and at what price, not what anybody else spends. Fifteen unsold shoulder days is a concrete target; no gaps is a different question entirely.
Sources & methods
- 48 CFR 31.205-1 on the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, read for paragraph (a), defining public relations as all functions and activities dedicated to maintaining, protecting and enhancing the image of a concern or its products, or to maintaining or promoting reciprocal understanding and favorable relations with the public at large or any segment of it, and including activities associated with areas such as advertising and customer relations; for paragraph (b), defining advertising as the use of media to promote the sale of products or services, regardless of the medium employed, when the advertiser has control over the form and content of what will appear, the media in which it will appear, and when it will appear, and listing media including conventions, exhibits, free goods, samples, magazines, newspapers, trade papers, direct mail, dealer cards, window displays, outdoor advertising, radio and television; for paragraph (c), providing that such costs include media time and space, purchased services performed by outside organizations, and the applicable portion of salaries, travel and fringe benefits of employees engaged in those functions; and for paragraph (d), restricting allowable advertising costs to those specifically required by contract or arising from Government contract requirements and exclusively for acquiring scarce items or disposing of scrap or surplus, costs of activities to promote sales of products normally sold to the Government including qualifying trade shows but excluding memorabilia such as models, gifts and souvenirs, alcoholic beverages, entertainment and facilities used primarily for entertainment, and costs allowable under 48 CFR 31.205-34. The cost principles govern allowability on federal contracts and impose nothing on a guiding business.
- 41 U.S.C. 1303 at the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, cited as the statutory authority under which the Federal Acquisition Regulation is issued. No marketing spend figure, percentage of revenue, range or benchmark for guided fishing is asserted anywhere on this page.
- The 2024 annual edition of 48 CFR 31.205-1 published on govinfo, used as an independent copy of the cost principle relied on above. Nothing of the kind described was found in any source consulted and nothing has been estimated from adjacent trades; the arithmetic panel uses stated illustrative assumptions. Nothing here is financial or accounting advice.
Every figure here is traced to a named public source and checked against it. Licensing, tax, and fee rules change. Verify your state’s current rules with the agency directly before you count on any number here.
Evan Knox
I build booking websites and run the ads and search for owner-run fishing guides, one operation per stretch of water. My first guide client, Bowman Fly Fishing, grew its revenue 4x in a year from that work. Field Notes is where I put the straight numbers on the business of guiding.
More field notes
A total with no attribution cannot be acted on.
I'm Evan. Every dollar I spend for a guide is traced to a booking. I build the site and run the ads, and you see what each produced. Free preview before you pay a cent.