In most markets, there are many companies to choose from when a user searches for a roofing contractor. Most companies offer similar services: roof repair, roof replacement, and new roof installations. In layman’s terms, it’s not complicated to define the service. So as a roofing professional, it’s important to be efficient when it comes to your paid ads, focusing on the factors you can control to maximize your paid search leads when competing against other roofing companies.

Using PPC Assist rather than an agency can give you a huge advantage when it comes to your cost/lead. Instead of paying a huge percentage of your budget (sometimes 50% or more) to the agency, you can put a lot more of it towards your actual clicks.

As experienced paid search managers, we’re used to working the levers and optimizing accounts. We know what a good setup looks like and how the roofing industry operates. Our builds take this experience into account, giving you a head start whether you’re launching new campaigns or improving current ones.

PPC Assist’s pay-per-click management model is a perfect fit for roofing company owners. Below, we’ll look at the factors that make it ideal for our management system.

PPC Assist Scorecard

The overall score for using PPC Assist in the Roofing Industry is 8.7/10. It would be even higher in southern markets where roofing work is more feasible year-round, bringing the seasonality score up. Even so, this is an extremely high score, meaning the PPC Assist management model is a great fit for roofing companies.

• Fast Decision Process: The urgency behind the search for a roofing contractor varies depending on whether a customer has roof damage, a leaky roof, or whether the roof is simply due to be replaced. Roofs with storm or wind damage and roofs leaking onto a ceiling should be replaced or repaired right away. On the other hand, someone with an old roof without damage or leaks might take their time deciding upon a roof contractor to hire.
• Measurable conversions: Like many service-based companies, roofing leads are mostly going to be phone calls and form submissions. PPC Assist can track both types of leads occurring on your website and then drill down to find the search terms that are driving referrals most efficiently. Calls coming directly from the ads themselves are also measurable.
• Niche Negatives: There is a high availability of niche negatives in the roofing industry. Here we will be excluding searches that indicate the user is researching types of shingles, wishes to purchase shingles, is looking to replace or replace their roof themselves, and roof cleaning service queries. Another factor to consider is shingle vs metal roofing (or other materials). If your company does not offer certain services, we’ll want to exclude those terms. Our pre-built lists are ready to go based on the services you want to target and website content you have available.
• Low Seasonality: There will be seasonality in Northern states due to winter weather, however search volume for the roofing industry across the rest of the United States remains fairly consistent throughout the year.
• High CPCs: The roofing industry is competitive, often resulting in high CPCs, especially for calls in competitive markets. Management fees should not be based on click costs or percentage of spend. PPC Assist’s as-needed model makes more sense for roofing company owners.
• Keyword Consistency: Roof repair, roof installation, and related keywords are very consistent here. Trends and roofing innovation rarely impact keywords and search volume in this industry.

Industry Insights

The market for roof repair, replacement, and installation is pretty straight-forward, but there are a few important considerations when targeting users in need of a roofing company.

Most of the volume comes from generic “roofing” searches, which can be a combination of people looking for a company to repair or install a roof, along with people who are researching how to re-shingle their roof on their own.

Users adding a modifier to their search to indicate they are interested in hiring someone to complete the roofing work – such as company, contractor, service, installers, or repairman – can mean more relevant leads for your company. But it can also mean much higher costs. We structure accounts in a way that allow you to put more emphasis on the keywords with the highest relevancy while allowing the conversion optimization model to weigh quality vs. cost.

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Depending on whether you prefer roof repair or installation jobs, we alter the strategy and ads to focus on the business areas where you want leads. The same goes for shingle vs metal roofing and residential vs commercial roofing.

We can even focus on targeting specific services to certain neighborhoods or areas.

Which leads us to location as the other important roofing industry consideration (we’ll cover this in detail further below). Users sometimes search by their home or business location. We use extensive negative lists of cities/counties/states that your company doesn’t serve (or that are not specifically targeted within the campaign).

Overall, we want to make sure we target the types of roofing jobs you want leads for, along with the locations that you want to serve. With effective conversion tracking in place and an occasional review of the search term report, campaigns can run effectively on the AI model without constant management.

This makes the PPC Assist model an effective fit for roof repair and installation companies.

Approximate CPCs (Cost per Clicks)

Google’s estimate for non-generic roofing search queries shows top of page bid estimates start at $9.13 to $12.08 and rise significantly for the absolute number 1 position. To drive leads aggressively, you’d want to target as many highly relevant keywords as possible to maximize impressions within the targeted service area.

That said, CPC varies a lot by market and region. It’s also highly dependent on the competition. If you’ve got a couple competitors with deep pockets – possibly paired with poor PPC management – it can drive CPC costs up significantly. If you’re lucky enough to be in a market without much competition, you won’t pay nearly as much.

If your budget is very limited, you can bid lower and try to drive traffic more efficiently. Or, you could target slightly less desirable keywords, which can come in at lower costs (like informational searches).

More specific roofing searches such as best roofing company near me, affordable roofers near me, and small roof repair contractors typically offer lower click costs – especially if you’re not going for the number 1 ad position. Be sure to include specific/niche keywords in your targeting, rather than just generic “roofing” or “roof repair”.

8 PPC Tips for Roofing Companies

We have some tips to help you minimize waste within your campaigns. Here are 8 ways to ensure high quality, highly relevant traffic is driven to your landing pages from your ad campaigns. Of course, any campaigns we design or manage have these implemented.

1. Location Targeting

Google and Bing have a very loose idea of “interested in” when it comes to geographic locations. We’ve seen clients in major metropolitan areas get a significant amount of international traffic for local services just because people have searched for places like NYC, Chicago, Dallas, or LA in the past. Don’t make the mistake of targeting people who have shown interest in your targeted locations.

The “Presence or interest” option sets a generous radius around your location. We’ve seen accounts use this setting and end up receiving a lot of ad clicks from other states or cities outside of the desired service area. As a local service provider this is something you don’t want.

If you want to use the “Presence or interest” setting to expand your targeting, you can. Be sure to use negative location exclusions aggressively for these campaigns, which is something you should do anyway. For example, if your company is located in Nashville, consider adding negatives for surrounding states, which would effectively just extend your reach to more rural Georgia to people who might be willing to travel to Nashville.

This can get a little more nuanced for the roofing industry. Sometimes people will qualify their search with a zip code or city for the job location, so you should be prepared with negative keywords to fight any irrelevant traffic.

By default, we exclude a number of countries from all campaigns that have high populations and frequently show an interest in the US (e.g. India, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc).

As part of the negative keyword lists, we also recommending excluding people searching for roofing services “in” an undesirable country/state/city/neighborhood, or even zip code.

2. Conversion-Focused Landing Pages

Maximizing conversion rates are an important when it comes to a success in paid search. We see a lot of roofing companies driving expensive traffic to websites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices or don’t have simple, effective call to actions.

Increasing conversion rates from 6% to 12% (or 18%) when the stakes are this high is invaluable.

Roofing is generally easy to understand, so you don’t need to spend a lot of time explaining the basics. The specific roofing options you offer are important though, so some communication is required to convince the user that you’ll be able to meet their needs. It’s important to feature relevant information quickly and near the top of the page. This gives the user confidence and enough information to fill out the form or give you a call.

Make sure your forms are short and easy to fill out, and that there is a clear business phone number on the website (especially for mobile).

Detailed content regarding your roofing services and company may be of interest to more research-oriented users and is best placed below the fold. The same goes for reviews, insurance, awards, and other community memberships.

3. Conversion Tracking

At PPC Assist, our management strategy relies heavily on effective conversion tracking to operate successfully. Utilizing “big data” AI-driven optimization relies on the algorithm being able to differentiate between a good click and a bad one.

Tracking contacts is vital, which for roofing companies typically means landing page form fills, contact form fills, click-to-calls, and calls from ads. During onboarding, we’ll make sure all of these are set up and tracked via Google Tag Manager.

If your company allows for online reservation and checkout, that’s an even higher quality data point that we’d want to include in optimization and decision making. We can even assign values for different order sizes to try to focus on more valuable leads.

If you’re using a third party for appointment scheduling, e-commerce, or reservation scheduling, that can sometimes present a challenge from a tracking perspective. You’d need to evaluate the conversion tracking options of each 3rd party tool you’re employing and figure out the best way to get that data into Google or Bing Ads, along with Google Analytics (GA4), Meta, and any other data sources you may be using.

For most companies in the roofing industry, tracking leads is enough. However, if you’re investing a lot into paid media ($5k+/month), you could take it a step further and feed lead quality data back into your acquisition sources. You could use lead scoring, differentiating between Leads vs MQLs vs SQLs, or even assign a dollar value to leads. Once you have enough data, you can optimize for qualified leads or value rather than just contacts.

Optimizing for qualified leads rather than simple contacts or form fills helps campaigns optimize for the right users, which gives you an advantage over advertisers who are optimizing for any contact. But it’s quite a bit more work, so most small companies in the industry avoid this level of complexity.

4. Comprehensive Ad Assets

Ad Assets allow for more creativity. The main idea here is to take up as much real estate on the SERP as Google will allow. Not using ad assets means you will have smaller, less compelling ads with lower quality scores, lower CTRs and higher CPCs.

Location Assets – Your Google Business listing is important, and it should be integrated into your account as an Asset. Map listings can be powerful, so make sure this is optimized and added to your account.

Call Assets – Get users to call you immediately, but only schedule these to run during business hours.

Callout Assets – These allow for some creativity and allow you to differentiate from competitors. Try to be specific with callouts at the campaign or ad group level. Talk specifically about what sets your roofing company apart from others.

Sitelink Assets – The more pages you have on your website, the more options you’ll have here. This allows you to be specific with Sitelink Assets, using not just service pages and contact pages, but also relevant resources, sub-services, or even testimonial pages.

Structured Snippets – Roofing companies will typically use the “Service Catalog” snippet to display the different services that they offer. For example, you might list Roof Repair, Roof Installation, Shingle Roofing, Metal Roofing, etc. Enter the services you prefer to provide to customers. You’ll need at least 3 entries to run structured snippets.

Image Extensions – Images draw attention to the ad and should be used in all cases. Keep in mind these appear quite small on search pages, so nothing too complicated. Just make your sure image is clear and high-quality.

Video Assets – Add these if you have some effective videos uploaded to YouTube. Who knows how Google will promote video assets in the future. As video continues to grow, utilizing this type of asset will be important in getting the attention of your target audience.

Promotion Assets – Offering a temporary discount for roofing services? Using a promotion extension will highlight it on the search page and bring a little extra attention to your ad. This requires a more active approach to management.

For all ad assets, it’s important to be as targeted as possible with them. That often means ad group or campaign level assets (depending on your structure) rather than account-level assets. The more you can speak directly to the needs of the user and differentiate yourself from competition on the SERPs, the more likely you’ll get those clicks and conversions.

5. Extensive Negative Keyword Lists

The importance of extensive negative keyword lists has moved way up the list of importance over the past few years. As Google and Bing have gotten more and more liberal with their keyword matching definitions, unintended targeting of certain search queries has become rampant. The only real way to combat this is with extensive negative keyword lists.

At PPC Assist, our negative keyword lists are immediately applied to current campaigns. This often results in immediate savings that more than cover our costs.

Still, we see unrelated or semi-related searches creep into phrase match campaigns that we really don’t want to be targeting. For example, “fix leaky roof” or “repair shingles”. You need to think hard about these types of search terms and whether you should really be targeting them. For our campaigns, we recommend negating them to keep search terms highly relevant and valuable.

Location negatives are very important. Exclude zips/states/cities/countries you don’t deliver to.

Other negatives that we recommend applying include specific words that would disqualify someone. Keywords such as free, cheap, hiring, job, and PDF can typically be negated.

One factor to consider is whether or not to target competitor brand names. Some companies and PPC managers love to do it, others consider it a big no-no. By default, we don’t exclude competitor brand names, but we do recommend breaking them into a separate campaign to analyze their effectiveness (if you want to run them).

6. Search Partners

The vast majority of Search Partners are not search engines at all. The content and quality of these partner websites varies greatly. They are also more prone to fake, spam or bot traffic along with invalid clicks. Parked Domains are also part of the Search Partner network, although these can be excluded at the account-level.

For roofing companies, we recommend disabling Search Partners to better control quality. If you have lead quality tracking in place, we do like to test Search Partners to see if it’s driving quality leads and worth investing in. Otherwise, however, we often find Google increases spend here that “converts” but quite frankly, doesn’t seem real.

If you do decide to run on Search Partners, it is important to monitor how much of your ad spend is being allocated to these websites and the quality of the leads reported from these campaigns.

7. Retargeting

Since roofing services aren’t always based on an immediate and urgent issue, like being locked out of your house or a furnace that doesn’t work, retargeting can be an effective tactic. Retargeting results largely depend on the length of the decision making process for potential customers, so be sure to set the audience durations (length of time you continue to advertise to website visitors) accordingly.

We typically recommend retargeting for all roofing companies with enough traffic to qualify (100 user minimum). Making a visual impact and continuing to reach users during the decision making process are reasons enough to test remarketing.

We don’t recommend keeping users on remarketing lists for a long period of time. This can affect your ability to get to minimum distribution requirements. 30- and 60-day durations are too long for this industry, and we tend to opt for 14 day targeting. That said, you need to set it large enough for eligibility.

Retargeting can also be done through several platforms. Rather than just retarget on Google Ads, you can expand reach to social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram in particular), or other Display and Video ad networks.

8. Time Restrictions / Bid Adjustments

If you have a small budget, it’s best to restrict ad times to when you can answer the phone or respond to messages/chats. The larger your phone number CTA on the website, the more this is true. If most of your leads are coming through your form or are collected in an automated way, there’s less urgency to do this.

Keep in mind if many of your competitors are ignoring late night traffic, click costs can be much lower during that time. So instead of eliminating bidding, consider using bid adjustments to allow for inexpensive volume if it’s available (users can always leave a message or fill out a form). If you’re using conversion-based bidding, Google will automatically do this.

Summary

The roofing industry is competitive and can face steep local competition and relatively high CPCs. As PPC evolves, it’s important to evolve with it. At PPC Assist, that’s exactly what we’re helping home service companies do.

Many agencies charge a high percentage of spend for PPC management, which doesn’t make a lot of sense when CPCs are high and budgets are low. Even worse are companies charging flat $500+ management fees on monthly budgets of less than $1k. We’ve seen it many times. With the increased effectiveness of AI-optimized tools and bidding, it makes more and more sense for roofing companies to use a model like PPC Assist rather than active management.

Regardless of what ongoing fees your company pays for Google Ads account management, an effective setup is absolutely crucial in order to achieve success. The tips above focus on putting you in a good place, structuring the account well and reducing wasteful spend as your account runs. There are certainly benefits for ongoing help (including seasonality adjustments), but for roofing companies our on-demand model makes a lot more sense than a high retainer fee.

If you’re interested in learning more about PPC Assist, check out our PPC for Roofing or PPC for Home Services pages, or view our pricing to see how much you can save on management. You can also request a free review of your account!