Let's TalkLet's TalkSome of the most expensive clicks in local search, bought largely by people who cannot buy a roof.
Give us read access to the account and your last hundred leads with outcomes. We come back with what proportion of spend went to repairs, renters and out-of-area searches, how storm periods were handled, and the three changes worth making first. Recorded walkthrough, no call required.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
"Roof leak" and "roof replacement cost" sit in the same account at similar click prices and are worth wildly different amounts. Repair searches are more numerous, cheaper to convert and largely unprofitable at these click costs, so an undifferentiated account spends most of its budget on the least valuable half of the market while reporting a healthy cost per lead.
When hail hits, every roofer in the county raises bids in the same forty-eight hours. Arriving then means buying at the worst prices of the year with campaigns assembled in a hurry. The accounts that do well have geography, creative and budget prepared and simply switch on - the work that makes a storm profitable happens months before it.
Renters, tenants and people asking on behalf of a landlord all click, call and count as leads. A single qualifying question in the form or the call script removes a meaningful share of them, and almost no roofing account has one - so the disqualification happens on the driveway after a crew slot has been spent.
A large share of replacement work is claim-funded, and those searchers are asking about deductibles, adjusters and whether a claim will raise their premium. Accounts bid on that traffic and then land it on a page about shingles and warranties, which answers none of it. The click is bought at a premium and then wasted on arrival.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
Building geography, creative and budget reserve before an event is unbillable work that looks like nothing on a monthly report, and it is the entire difference between capturing a hail storm and bidding into it at peak prices alongside everyone else.
Ownership and scope qualification cuts the number of enquiries, which looks worse on every standard chart. We report cost per signed contract next to it so the trade is visible, because in this trade an unqualified lead costs a crew slot rather than an email.
Most roofing landing pages are about materials and warranties because that is what contractors know. The claim-funded buyer is asking an entirely different set of questions, and answering those is both better marketing and content that keeps earning outside the ad account.
The account view shows cost per lead; the lead list shows which of those could ever have bought a roof. The gap is the brief.
Different campaigns, different bids, different pages. Premium clicks should only be bought for work that can carry them.
One question, asked early. It removes a meaningful share of the waste before a crew slot is committed.
Landing pages and content about deductibles, adjusters and scope, which is what a claim-funded buyer is actually researching.
Geography, creative and budget reserve built and paused, ready to switch on within hours of an event.
Spend follows signed work and job value rather than lead volume, which usually reorders the campaigns immediately.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
Storm demand follows a track that rarely matches a circle around your yard. Prepared geographic layers that can be switched to the affected footprint put your budget where there is a reason to call this week, instead of spreading it across homeowners whose roofs are fine.
Commercial searches are lower volume, far higher value and researched by a different person on a different timeline. Left in the residential account they are judged on residential conversion rates and defunded for being slow, when they are frequently the better margin.
It is the default roofing offer and it attracts exactly the volume you would expect, much of it unqualified. Used with ownership qualification attached it works; used as an open invitation it fills the calendar with inspections that were never going to become contracts.
Blending them produces an annual average that describes neither and hides both - a good storm month flatters a weak baseline, and a quiet quarter looks like failure when it was simply dry. Reporting them separately is what keeps the account honest.
Our closest paid-search engagement is an automotive account, not a roofing one, and we will not dress it up. The reason it is the right comparison is lead qualification at premium click prices: high-value purchases where a large share of enquiries could never proceed, and where the gain came from buying fewer and better clicks rather than more of them. That is the roofing problem exactly.
Read the full case studyBecause the job value is high, the competition includes storm-chasing operators with short horizons, and everyone bids into the same narrow window after weather events. The click price is not really the problem - the problem is buying those premium clicks for repair intent and for people who do not own the roof. Fix the qualification and the click price becomes affordable.
Yes, with campaigns prepared in advance rather than assembled during the event. Reacting means entering the auction at the worst prices of the year with untested creative. The roofers who profit from storms had the geography, the pages and the budget reserve ready weeks earlier and only had to switch them on.
Separate campaigns rather than negative keywords alone, because repair intent is legitimate business for many roofers - just business that cannot carry a replacement-level click price. Bid it at what a repair is worth, land it on its own page, and stop letting it draw from the replacement budget.
For claim-funded traffic: what the claims process involves, what a deductible means for them, what happens if the adjuster's scope is short, and what they should not sign. For cash buyers: scope, materials, warranty and price transparency. These are different pages, and most accounts run one page written for the second buyer while bidding mostly on the first.
Where available it is usually worth testing, particularly for repair and inspection intent where the Google Guaranteed badge does real work for an anxious homeowner. It is less suited to claim-funded replacement work, where the buyer needs a longer explanation than the format allows. Run it as its own measured line rather than folding it into search reporting.
Call tracking and form tracking reconciled to signed contracts and average job value, not to leads. A campaign producing cheap inspections and a campaign producing expensive replacement enquiries will rank in opposite orders depending on which number you use, and only one of those orders reflects the business.
This is one part of a bigger service. Here is the whole of it, and the closest neighbours.
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