Emergency waterproofing converts this week, a tower re-roof converts next fiscal year
The two jobs you sell run on different clocks, so they need different campaigns, separate budgets and separate definitions of success.
Leak and waterproofing searches happen under pressure. Intent is high, the click is expensive, the decision is fast. Judge that campaign weekly on calls answered and surveys booked, and staff the phone accordingly.
Capital re-roof searches behave nothing like that. A manager gathers information for a board that meets on its own schedule, and the money moves when the association's finances allow. Judging that campaign on this month's cost per lead will get it switched off long before it produces anything.
Split them at the campaign level so budgets cannot borrow from each other, and give each its own conversion action. Blended reporting on two sales cycles this different is how good spend gets cut.
Run the slow campaign at a steady, modest level rather than in bursts. Bursts miss the weeks that matter, and nobody can predict which week a roof consultant starts drafting a specification.
Every residential shingle click is money you set on fire
For a low-slope contractor, the largest lever in a Miami-Dade account is not a bid adjustment; it is an exclusion list that removes an entire market.
Roofing demand in this county is overwhelmingly residential, and the platforms will happily hand all of it to you. Homeowners pricing a shingle repair, claim shoppers, people looking for a roofing job: every one of them spends money that should have reached a building with a manager attached.
Build the exclusion list before the keyword list. Residential covering terms, homeowner cost and calculator queries, hiring and apprenticeship searches, supply and materials shopping, and whatever else your own query report keeps surfacing in week two.
Read query reports weekly at the start rather than monthly. Competitive pressure in this metro pushes broad matching hard, and it will keep finding creative ways to spend on the wrong kind of roof.
Geography deserves the same discipline. Buy the parts of the county your crews and staging arrangements can actually serve, and leave the rest until the operation can support it.
Bid on the failure mode: ponding, blistering, recover versus tear-off
Commercial roof searches describe symptoms and decisions rather than products, and the symptom terms are cheaper and better qualified than the category ones.
A term like "commercial roofing Miami" is expensive, vague and crowded with national bidders. "Ponding water on a flat roof" and "recover or replace a low-slope roof" are neither, and the person typing them is describing a building they are responsible for.
Group keywords by the decision being made. One group for diagnosis, one for system choice, one for procurement and specification. The ad copy for each should sound like it was written by somebody who has stood on that roof.
Match landing pages to groups. Dropping a specification query on a homepage wastes the most valuable clicks in the account, and those are the clicks that eventually turn into a survey.
Keep a small brand campaign running. Competitors in this market bid on other firms' names, and defending yours costs little compared with losing a board that had already decided to call you.
The property manager who signs is easier to reach on LinkedIn than on Google
Search only catches a building at the moment it has a problem; professional network targeting reaches the people whose buildings will have one next year.
Portfolios in Miami-Dade concentrate in a manageable number of management companies, associations and owner operators, and the relevant job titles are targetable: community association manager, portfolio manager, director of engineering, facilities and asset managers.
Budget for what it actually does. Paid social will not produce a booked survey this week and should not be measured that way. It buys recognition, which is what makes your proposal readable when it eventually lands in a board packet next to two others.
Creative should be evidence rather than slogans. A finished roof on an occupied building, a staging photograph in a tight Brickell service lane, a short note on how the lobby stayed dry through a tear-off. Buyers in this trade are persuaded by logistics.
Retarget the visitors who reached a system page or your credentials page and did not inquire. In a long cycle, remaining visible for months is close to the whole tactic.
Spanish creative changes the arithmetic in Hialeah and Doral
Spanish campaigns commonly face fewer bidders, and the call that follows has to be answered in Spanish or the saving is imaginary.
A great deal of business across Miami-Dade is conducted in Spanish. English only ads simply do not appear for a meaningful share of the searches that matter to a commercial roofer here, and no bid strategy compensates for not being in the auction.
Do not translate ads; write them. An owner operated industrial building in Hialeah or Doral responds to different framing than a board in Brickell, and a translated English headline usually reads like one.
Give Spanish campaigns their own landing pages, their own budget line and their own reporting. Folded into a general account, they get judged on blended averages and quietly starved before anyone sees what they were doing.
Then audit the intake. A Spanish click that reaches an English voicemail costs you twice: once for the click, once for the impression it leaves.
Report cost per roof survey on a named building
Leads are not the unit of a commercial roofing business. Buildings are.
One building can produce three inquiries: the manager, a board member and the engineer. Counted as leads, that looks like a strong month. Counted as buildings, it is a single opportunity, and the difference matters when you are deciding whether to increase spend.
Define the conversion as a survey scheduled at an identified address with a decision path you can describe. Push that back into the ad platforms as an offline conversion so bidding optimizes toward the thing you actually want.
Hold two numbers in view: cost per survey, and the share of surveys that become approved contracts. The second is not a marketing metric, and it is still the one that decides whether the first is acceptable.
Cost per click, impression share and quality scores are diagnostics for the person managing the account. They belong in the working document, not in the summary you read on a Monday.
Questions we actually get
- What should we spend to start?
- Enough to gather query data quickly in one clearly defined service area, rather than a thin amount spread across the county. We would rather run a narrow, well excluded account that produces readable data in weeks than a broad one that produces noise for a quarter. The right number depends on your crew capacity, which is a conversation before any money moves.
- Are Local Services Ads worth it for commercial roofing?
- They lean heavily toward residential service demand, so a low-slope commercial contractor usually gets less from them than a retail roofer would. Worth testing in a controlled way if you also run residential work, but it is not where we would start for condominium and commercial buildings.
- Can we advertise that our assemblies are code compliant in the HVHZ?
- Be careful. Assemblies here generally require a Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance or an HVHZ marked Florida Product Approval, and it is fair to say which approved systems you install. Claiming a general compliance guarantee in ad copy is a promise about somebody else's building, and it is worth confirming any wording with your own counsel.
- How do we measure paid social when nothing converts immediately?
- By its own standards: reach into the right job titles, engagement from people who match your target portfolios, and the change in the share of inquiries that arrive already knowing who you are. Ask on the intake form and in the survey how they first heard of you, and accept that the attribution will be imperfect.
- Should we bid on competitors' names?
- Sometimes, and it depends on how litigious your market is and how disciplined you can be about the ad copy. The stronger case is defensive: bidding on your own name so a competitor does not sit above you when a board searches for the firm they were told to call.
