A twenty mile radius around your yard spends half its money across a bridge
Radius targeting ignores water, and the bay turns a short map distance into a long afternoon.
Draw twenty miles around a yard in Brandon or Westchase and the circle takes in Pinellas addresses reachable only by the Howard Frankland, the Gandy or the Courtney Campbell. The click costs the same as a local one. The job costs you an estimator's afternoon.
Replace radius targeting with named locations you have decided to serve: specific counties, cities and ZIP codes. Slower to set up, far easier to defend when someone asks why the budget went where it went.
Check the location option that controls presence versus interest. Left at the default, ads can show to people merely researching your area from elsewhere. Set it to presence for a trade that has to physically arrive, and exclusions become meaningful instead of decorative.
Then be honest about the edges. Tarpon Springs, Apollo Beach and Plant City are all inside somebody's definition of Tampa Bay. If you do not run crews there profitably, exclude them and put the money where the trucks already are.
Hillsborough and Pinellas deserve separate campaigns and separate budgets
Two dispatch zones behave like two businesses, so give them two sets of controls.
Separate campaigns give you separate budgets, separate schedules, separate ad copy naming the right cities and separate negative lists. More importantly they give you a switch. When the Hillsborough crews are booked three weeks out and Pinellas has open slots, you can move money in an afternoon.
Ad copy should name the county or the city the searcher is in. A Clearwater homeowner reading an ad that says Tampa assumes a drive, a delay and a premium. Naming their side of the water removes an objection before the click.
Landing pages follow the same logic. Send Pinellas traffic to a page that shows Pinellas work and states plainly that you serve that side of the bay. Sending everyone to one generic page wastes the targeting you just paid for.
Pace to capacity rather than to a flat monthly line. Roofing demand moves with weather and with the calendar, and a budget that ignores how many inspection slots exist next week will buy calls nobody can answer.
Bid on the trigger event, not on the word roofer
The searches worth the most money describe something that just happened to the homeowner.
A carrier inspection letter, a home purchase with a closing date, a stain appearing after a storm, a note from a home inspector: each produces a search with a deadline attached. Those searches convert faster than a general roofing query and usually cost less, because fewer competitors bother to structure around them.
Build tight groups around those situations and write the ad to name the situation back to the reader. Keep any language about insurance carefully neutral. You can say you provide a written report and documentation; you cannot suggest a claim outcome, and pretending otherwise creates problems well beyond advertising.
Keep the broad head terms running at a controlled budget, but expect them to be expensive and mixed. They are worth holding for volume, not for efficiency.
Negatives deserve as much attention as keywords. Cleaning and pressure washing searches, pest and animal removal searches, job seekers, material suppliers and DIY questions will all take money from a reroof budget if nobody is watching the search terms report weekly.
Four in the afternoon on the Courtney Campbell is a bid you should be lowering
Drive time is a bidding variable here, not just an operations problem.
A Clearwater lead that arrives at four in the afternoon while your crew is finishing in Riverview is worth less than the same lead at eight in the morning. Bid adjustments by hour and by location let you say so in the account rather than absorbing it in the field.
Use the ad schedule to concentrate spending when the office is staffed. A call that rings out during a tear off is a paid click delivered to voicemail, and roofing buyers rarely leave one.
After hours, switch the emphasis to forms and text. Buy the click if you can capture the request and reply first thing; do not buy call clicks nobody will answer.
Review this quarterly rather than once. Crew composition changes, a new hire on the Pinellas side changes the math, and the schedule that was right in spring is wrong by fall.
A relocation clock is short, and the offer has to fit inside it
MacDill and the wider defense adjacent population keep a steady flow of newcomers deciding on a compressed timeline.
Somebody arriving on transfer orders is buying a house, choosing schools and handling a roof question in the same few weeks. They have no shortlist and very little patience for a process that starts with a call back window.
The offer matters more than the discount. A scheduled inspection with a named date and a written report beats a free estimate, because the constraint is time rather than price.
Write plainly and respectfully. Avoid trading on service imagery; it reads as hollow to the audience it targets. Specificity about scheduling and turnaround does the persuading.
The same structure works for anyone under a closing deadline, which in a metro with constant in migration is a meaningful share of the market at any time.
Two dispatch zones need two cost per booked job columns
A blended cost per lead across the bay hides the only thing you need to know.
Report cost per booked inspection and cost per signed job, split by county. A single blended figure can look healthy while every profitable slot is on one side of the water and the other side is buying calls that never turn into a truck roll.
Get the connection right before you argue about the number. Call tracking on the ads, form submissions tagged by campaign, and a status in your system for booked, completed and signed. Without that, the report is guesswork with charts on it.
Watch the gap between booked and completed. In this metro a high cancellation rate on one side of the bay usually means the ads are reaching addresses your schedule cannot really absorb, which is a targeting fix rather than a bidding fix.
No agency can promise a lead volume or a cost per job, and anyone quoting one has not seen your capacity or your close rate. What can be committed to is the structure, the exclusions and reporting you can check yourself.
Questions we actually get
- Should I use a radius or pick locations manually?
- Pick locations manually in this metro. A radius drawn from any yard here includes water and reaches addresses the schedule cannot absorb well, and the reporting will not tell you that until appointments start canceling. Named counties, cities and ZIP codes take longer to set up and are far easier to hold accountable.
- Do I need separate campaigns for Hillsborough and Pinellas?
- In most cases yes, once spending is meaningful. Separate campaigns let you move budget to whichever side has open inspection slots, write ads that name the searcher's own city, and see cost per booked job by dispatch zone instead of a blended average that hides which crews are busy.
- What should I exclude?
- Start with roof cleaning and pressure washing, animal and pest removal, employment searches, material suppliers, DIY and pure information queries, plus any city you do not actually serve. Then read the search terms report weekly for the first two months. Exclusion lists in this trade are never finished, and the expensive additions are always the surprising ones.
- Can you tell me what a roofing lead will cost in Tampa?
- Not honestly, and be cautious with anyone who does before seeing your account. Cost varies with covering type, repair versus replacement, competition on your side of the bay and how quickly your office answers. What we can do is build the structure so that within a couple of months you have a real cost per booked inspection by county, measured from your own data.
- Can ads mention insurance claims?
- Tread carefully. You can state that you provide a written report and photographs and that you work with owners going through a claim. You should not imply a claim will be approved or a policy renewed. Terms vary by carrier and change over time, and it is worth confirming specifics with your insurer or your own counsel before publishing anything about coverage.
