Ice dam removal and roof snow removal are their own auctions in January
The winter keyword set has almost nothing in common with the summer one, and most roofing accounts never build it.
Between the first hard freeze and the last thaw the profitable searches change completely: ice dam removal, roof snow removal, emergency roof leak, attic leak, flat roof leak repair, emergency tarp. Different intent, different landing page, different price expectation.
Run them as a separate campaign that switches on by weather rather than by month. A warm week in January produces the same melt as a thaw in March, and the auction responds within hours.
Decide in advance whether you want ice dam work at all. Steaming is slow, skilled and often ends in a modest invoice. Plenty of roofers buy those clicks purely as an introduction to a spring re-roof conversation, which is a legitimate reason to pay for them as long as you track it that way.
The summer campaign covering tear-offs, flat roof replacement, gutters and flashing should not inherit winter bids or winter negatives.
Three quarters of wasted roofing spend hides in gutters, solar and hiring searches
Writing the exclusion list is the highest paid hour of work in a roofing account.
Roofing terms bleed into work you do not sell and people who will never buy. Gutter cleaning, solar panel installation, chimney and tuckpointing, siding, roofing jobs, roofer salary, roofing supply, how to, cost calculator, DIY.
Add the exclusions specific to a cold market. Snow removal companies looking for subcontractors. Apartment maintenance searches. Students writing about building science. Add competitor names only if you can defend the click with a page that beats theirs.
Exact and phrase match will not save you. Broad match with automated bidding finds every adjacent query in Chicagoland, so write the negatives before launch and keep writing them weekly for the first two months.
Read the search terms report with your dispatcher rather than alone. He already knows which phrases produce calls that waste an afternoon.
Bid where your dumpster fits, not where the radius reaches
A circle drawn around the yard buys addresses your crew cannot stage a tear-off on profitably.
Narrow lots, rear alley access, permit parking and tight gangways decide what a job actually costs you. A three-flat in Wicker Park with a blocked alley is not the same job as a ranch in Schaumburg with a driveway, even at the same square count.
Build targeting on zip clusters that match how you crew and stage. City neighborhoods where you have done the alley work before. Near suburbs such as Oak Park, Berwyn, Skokie and Evanston. The outer collar counties as their own line with their own bid and their own patience.
Watch location of interest as well as physical location. Landlords living in Lakeview search for buildings they own in Pilsen or Bridgeport, and a location setting that ignores that will filter out good money.
Exclude what you cannot serve. Bidding on Will County while your nearest crew works the North Side is how an attractive cost per lead turns into an ugly cost per job.
The last dry weeks before the freeze are the most expensive clicks of the year
Every homeowner who has been putting off a roof decides in the same three weeks, and every roofer in the metro bids against them.
Chicago has a hard deadline that warm markets never impose. Work has to be finished before the roof stays frozen, and owners know it. Late in the season competition and cost per click climb together while the buyer gets more decisive.
There are two defensible responses. Spend into the rush if you have crew capacity and can close quickly, because the buyer has already made up their mind. Or spend earlier, in the shoulder weeks, when the same buyer is cheaper and slower.
A flat monthly budget is the wrong shape for either. Set the year as a curve: spring recovery, the summer body of work, the autumn rush, and a winter emergency line that turns on with a thaw.
Whichever you choose, do not let the account run dry on the day the buyer is ready. Check pacing weekly, not monthly.
Turn the emergency campaign off when the board is full, not when the budget runs out
Paid demand you cannot service costs you twice, once for the click and again for the review.
The winter peak is emergency shaped, and every phone in the metro rings during the same forty-eight hours. Buying a click you cannot answer or dispatch means paying a premium for a bad experience.
Set the ad schedule around who genuinely answers. If nobody picks up at nine at night, do not run a call-only ad at nine at night. Run a form or a callback commitment you will actually keep.
Give one person the authority to pause the emergency campaign when the schedule is full and to switch it back on when it clears. It should take a minute and no meeting.
Route after-hours calls somewhere real. An overflow answering service that takes an address, a building type and whether water is coming in now is worth more than any bid adjustment you will make this winter.
Your dispatch board is the only honest report on a roofing campaign
Cost per lead is a comfortable number, and cost per job on the calendar is the one that tells you whether to spend more.
Roofing inquiries vary enormously in value. A tarp call, a gutter repair and a two-flat tear-off are not comparable, and averaging them into a single cost per lead hides which campaign is paying for itself.
Connect the platform to the outcome. Call tracking on every ad number, a source field the office fills in without thinking, and offline conversions with contract value sent back so bidding optimizes toward signed work rather than form fills.
Report by segment: emergency against planned, city against collar counties, pitched against low-slope. Three or four lines reviewed monthly beside the crew calendar is enough.
Attach a source to every signed job. Without it, every spending decision next season is a guess dressed up as analysis.
Questions we actually get
- How much should a Chicago roofing company spend on Google Ads?
- Work backward rather than picking a number. Take an average contract value you can actually verify from your own books, an honest close rate from completed inspections, and the crew days you need to fill. That gives you the maximum you can pay for a booked job, and the budget follows. Any agency quoting a figure before seeing those numbers is guessing.
- Should we run Local Services Ads as well as search ads?
- They occupy different space on the page and are usually worth testing together, since the profile ads sit above the standard search ads. Eligibility and verification requirements vary and are worth confirming directly, particularly given that licensing differs between the city and the surrounding counties. Track them as separate lines, not as one lumped lead count.
- Do we bid on competitor names?
- Only if the landing page genuinely gives the searcher a reason to switch, and only with the understanding that they may return the favor. For most roofing accounts here the money is better spent on problem searches and low-slope terms that nobody has bothered to cover properly.
- Should the ads run at all in deep winter?
- Usually yes, but as a different campaign. Emergency leak, ice dam and roof snow searches are live all winter and the intent is urgent. Keep it separate from the replacement campaign, schedule it around who really answers the phone, and pause it when the board is full.
- How do we know a click turned into an actual roof?
- Call tracking numbers on every ad, a source field completed at intake, and offline conversion imports that send signed contract value back to the platform. Without that loop the bidding optimizes toward whoever fills in a form fastest, which is not the same person as the homeowner who signs for a tear-off.
