Repair money and re-roof money need separate campaigns
A repair click and a replacement click are different products with different margins, and pooling them lets the cheap one eat the budget.
Repair searches are cheaper, more frequent and more urgent. Left in the same campaign, they will consume the daily budget by lunchtime and starve the replacement terms that pay for the showroom.
Split them at campaign level so each has its own budget, its own landing page and its own idea of success. Repair is measured on booked service calls. Replacement is measured on booked in-home estimates.
The repair campaign still earns its place. A good patch today is a warm replacement lead in two years, provided somebody records the roof age and follows up.
If budget is tight, fund replacement first. It is the harder demand to buy back later.
Bid the covering type: shingle, tile, metal, flat
Homeowners search the material they own, and the material tells you what the job is worth before anyone answers the phone.
Ad groups built around tile replacement, metal roofing, shingle replacement and flat roof systems let you write ad copy that matches the query and set bids that match job value.
Tile and metal enquiries usually justify more aggressive bidding than a small shingle job. Your own closed-job data should set that ranking, not an industry average.
Landing pages must follow the split. Sending a tile searcher to a general roofing page is the single most common cause of an expensive click that never becomes an appointment.
Add the practical qualifiers people actually type: replace, cost, contractor, near me, quote. Leave the rest to broader campaigns you can watch closely.
Negatives matter more than bids: tarps, adjusters, DIY, jobs
Most roofing accounts we see are losing a quarter of their spend to traffic that was never going to hire a contractor.
Build the negative list before the first ad runs, not after the first invoice. The recurring offenders are job seekers, students, DIY researchers, tarp and emergency patch shoppers, insurance claim and public adjuster queries, and anyone searching for free roof programmes.
Insurance claim traffic deserves a deliberate decision rather than a default. A retail re-roof brand often wants less of it, because the sales cycle is longer, the paperwork is heavier and the customer is negotiating with a carrier rather than with you.
Supplier and material price queries also drain budget. Somebody comparing shingle bundle prices is shopping a store, not a contractor.
Review search terms weekly at first. The list is never finished, and the first sixty days set the trajectory for the account.
Local Services Ads sit above your search ad, so decide early
Google's Local Services placement takes the top of the page for many roofing queries, and pretending it is not there does not help.
The sensible posture is usually both: Local Services for the high intent proximity searches, standard search for the covering-type and research queries where you can control the landing page and the message.
Local Services runs on a different economy. Verification, licensing and insurance documents, review volume and responsiveness drive delivery more than clever copy does.
If nobody answers the phone reliably, Local Services will punish you faster than search ads will. Fix the phone before increasing the budget.
Watch the two channels for overlap. If the same enquiry is being paid for twice, tighten the search campaign rather than the profile.
Pace spend to your crew calendar, not to a flat monthly line
A roofing budget spent evenly across a month ignores the fact that your capacity is not even.
When the crews are booked out weeks ahead, aggressive spend buys appointments you cannot service, and the customer books someone who can start sooner. Pull budget back and protect the pipeline instead.
Daypart around the office, not around theory. Clicks that arrive when nobody answers become a voicemail and a competitor's job.
Weather driven surges are worth riding, but a retail re-roof business should not build its economics around them. Storm chasers can bid at losses you cannot match because they never intend to be here next year.
Retargeting is the cheapest line on the plan: everyone who reached the estimate form and left, everyone who watched a showroom video, everyone who opened a proposal and went quiet. Paid social carries that job well for a brand with a showroom to show.
Cost per booked re-roof is the only number worth reporting
Cost per lead flatters an account; cost per signed contract, by covering type, tells you where to put the next thousand dollars.
Get calls and forms into the CRM with the campaign attached, then push the booked and won outcomes back into the ad platform. Without that loop, bidding optimises toward whichever ad group produces the most cheap enquiries.
Track the whole chain: click, enquiry, appointment held, proposal issued, contract signed. The leak is usually between enquiry and appointment held, which is a phone problem rather than an advertising problem.
Quoted price in ad copy is a trap in Palm Beach County. When a mandated roof-to-wall connection retrofit is triggered, the county requires a separate B Subpermit because installing new straps or anchors sits outside a roofing contractor's scope; a roofer may generally only add fasteners to existing straps. Advertise a process and a free inspection, not a fixed number that a second licence class can move.
Report monthly on jobs and revenue by covering type. Everything else is diagnostics.
Questions we actually get
- What should a West Palm Beach roofer budget for Google Ads?
- Budget is set by capacity, not by a benchmark. Work backwards: how many re-roofs do you want to add per month, what is your current close rate from held estimates, and how many appointments does that require. We would rather run a smaller budget that fills the calendar profitably than a large one that generates enquiries nobody calls back.
- Are Local Services Ads better than regular search ads for roofing?
- They serve different moments. Local Services wins the top of the page on urgent nearby searches and rewards reviews and fast phone answering. Standard search lets you control the covering-type message and the landing page, which matters for the planned replacement buyer. Most roofers should run both and watch for the two channels buying the same enquiry twice.
- Should we advertise on insurance claim and storm damage terms?
- Only deliberately. That traffic converts into a longer, more paperwork heavy process where the homeowner is negotiating with a carrier, and it attracts competitors who bid it as a volume play. A retail re-roof brand with a showroom usually earns more per dollar on planned replacement terms. If you do run claim terms, keep them in their own campaign with their own budget.
- Why not just buy leads from a lead aggregator?
- Because you are buying an enquiry that three other contractors received at the same moment, which turns the conversation into a price fight before anyone has climbed a ladder. Bought leads can fill a gap. They do not build an asset, and the price rises whenever the seller finds a buyer more desperate than you.
- How quickly can paid search produce booked jobs?
- Faster than organic search, and that is the honest reason to run it, but we will not promise a volume or a date. Realistically the first weeks are spent on search terms and negatives while the account learns which queries book appointments. The speed limit after that is usually your phone answering and estimate scheduling, not the ad platform.
