Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany buy roofs on three different schedules
Three parishes inside one metro average into a number that hides which half of your budget is working.
In Orleans Parish a great deal of the stock is older and raised on piers, lots are narrow, and a share of the work sits under historic district review. Repairs are common, staging is harder, and the estimator spends longer on site.
Jefferson is a different job. Metairie and Kenner carry more postwar suburban housing, easier access and a higher share of straightforward full replacements. Across the river, the West Bank and Algiers add another wrinkle, because a bridge sits between you and the address no matter what a radius map says.
St. Tammany is a drive. Mandeville, Covington and Slidell hold newer homes and buyers who compare warranty terms, and the round trip eats a half day if your yard is on the south shore.
Give each one its own campaign, its own budget and its own landing page. Then decide honestly which you want more of. Some contractors should turn the Northshore off entirely rather than pay to reach jobs their crews resent.
The French Quarter draws clicks from people who will never own a roof
Your negative keyword list is worth more here than any bid adjustment, and the first draft should be written before the campaign goes live.
Search interest in the architecture of this city is enormous and almost entirely non commercial. Photographers, students, tourists looking for a rooftop bar, people researching a Creole cottage they will never own. All of it can land on a broad match roofing keyword.
Start the exclusions with the obvious commercial mismatches: jobs, hiring, salary, DIY, courses, wholesale, supplier, insurance adjuster. Add the adjacent trades people confuse with roofing, including roof cleaning, moss and pressure washing, plus solar shoppers researching an Entergy bill who need a roof only incidentally.
Then add the local ones. Architecture, tour, photos, history, and the terms that pull people toward the Quarter for reasons that have nothing to do with a leak.
Read the search terms report weekly for the first month and monthly after that. Every campaign in this trade develops new leaks in its keyword list, and nobody catches them by looking at a dashboard summary.
Slate, copper and standing seam deserve their own budget line
Covering type predicts both the size of the job and the number of contractors who can actually do it.
Generic replacement terms are crowded, and the click prices reflect a market where every company bids on the same phrase. Specialty terms are rarer, arrive from people with a specific roof, and often carry a much larger ticket.
Break them out so the money is visible. A campaign for slate and one for metal, with their own ads and their own landing pages showing your own work on those systems. If you cannot show the work, do not bid the term, because the click will bounce and you will have paid for it anyway.
Low-slope residential belongs in its own group too. A shotgun with a flat rear addition is a specific problem, and the person searching for it is describing exactly what they have.
Repairs and full replacements should also stay apart. A repair searcher and a replacement searcher have different urgency, different budgets and different objections, and one ad cannot speak to both without going vague.
A week of rain stops the crews and starts the searching
Demand and capacity move in opposite directions here, so a flat monthly budget line is always wrong at the moment it matters most.
Heavy rain does two things at once. It reveals leaks, which raises search interest, and it stops production, which fills your schedule with rescheduled work.
Pace against the calendar your crews are actually working. When the schedule is booked out and the phone is still ringing, either raise the bar on what you buy, shifting toward larger jobs, or ease spend rather than paying premium prices for calls you will answer slowly.
Hold a reserve outside the monthly number for the days after significant weather. A budget that has already been spent evenly across the month has nothing left for the week when intent is highest.
Match ad schedules to who is answering. Running ads at seven in the morning is only useful if a human picks up at seven. An unanswered call bought at a premium is the most expensive thing in the account.
A raised house in Bywater and a slab in Kenner do not cost the same to work
Cost per lead flattens differences that decide whether the job was worth winning.
Access, staging, tear-off logistics and disposal are not constant across this metro. A narrow lot with no driveway and a raised structure takes longer to set up than a suburban replacement with a truck parked twelve feet from the ladder.
Feed signed jobs back into the ad platform so bidding optimizes toward work you actually completed rather than toward whoever fills out forms fastest. Import the conversions with values attached if your systems can carry them.
Report cost per booked job, split by parish. Two campaigns can show identical lead costs and completely different economics once you count the drive, the setup and the close rate.
Track the source all the way to the contract. If your CRM cannot tell you which campaign produced a signed roof, the reporting you are reading is a story about form fills, not about revenue.
Low-slope work over a Bywater warehouse should not share a campaign with re-roofs
Commercial buyers use different words, decide on a different clock and need their own money.
Small commercial exists throughout this market: converted warehouses in Bywater and the Marigny, storefronts in Mid-City, strip centers across Metairie. The buyer is an owner or a property manager, not a homeowner in a driveway.
Their searches name the system and the problem: ponding, membrane, recover versus tear-off, roof survey. Those terms rarely appear in a residential keyword list, and a residential landing page loses them immediately.
Give commercial its own campaign, its own page and its own follow-up sequence, because the decision usually takes longer and involves someone who has to justify the spend to somebody else.
Count roof surveys performed on named buildings rather than leads. A single commercial relationship can outlast a year of residential campaigns, so the reporting should reflect that instead of burying it in an average.
Questions we actually get
- What should we budget to start?
- There is no honest universal number, and any agency that quotes one before looking at your keywords and your capacity is guessing. Work backward instead: pick the one job type you most want more of, find what those clicks actually cost in this market by running a small controlled test, and set a budget that can buy enough clicks in a week to learn something. Then scale what closes.
- Should we run Local Services Ads as well as search ads?
- They are worth evaluating, since they occupy the top of the page and are priced per lead rather than per click. Check whether the categories match the work you want, and be ready to manage lead disputes and the response times the format expects. Test them alongside search rather than replacing search on the assumption they are cheaper.
- Do we need separate ads for each parish, or can we just use location bid adjustments?
- Separate campaigns are worth the extra management. Budget control is the reason: bid adjustments still let one geography drain money from another, while separate campaigns let you cap the Northshore, protect Orleans and read the results without pulling a report apart line by line.
- Can our ads mention insurance claims?
- Tread lightly. Never promise coverage, approval or an outcome, since that is between the property owner, their insurer and their own counsel, and Louisiana is the one state operating under civil law rather than common law. Describe what your crew documents, keep it general, and have an attorney review the ad copy and the landing page before either runs.
- How do we know a call turned into a real job?
- Use call tracking that passes the source through to your CRM, record calls where permitted and disclosed, and require the office to mark the outcome. Then push those outcomes back to the ad platform. Without that loop you are optimizing toward volume, and volume in this trade is easy to buy and expensive to keep.
