Google Ads for roofers

What do you need before you turn the ads on?

Roofing carries some of the most expensive clicks in local search, so an account that is not ready burns real money in the first fortnight. Most of this is a phone, a calendar and a service area job rather than an advertising one.

• Somebody who answers, and inspection slots to offer. Roofing leads want an appointment rather than a truck tonight, and the roofer who gets on the roof first usually writes the job.
• An honest service area. The area your crew will actually work, not the map you would like. Roofing travels further than most trades because the ticket is bigger, but every mile past that buys estimates you will never chase.
• A decision on which work you take. Residential only or commercial too. Repairs, or replacements above a certain size. Solar removal, gutters, mobile homes. Write the list down, because it becomes your negative keyword list an hour later.
• Conversion tracking that counts booked inspections. Google optimizes toward whatever outcome you give it, and given nothing it chases cheap clicks. The cheapest clicks in roofing are homeowners pricing a patch they mean to do themselves.

That list is yours, and nobody can do it for you. The Google Ads half is the part myAgency does.

How do you set up a roofing campaign?

Five ad groups, split by the kind of work and what it is worth. Keeping them apart is how you stop a run of small repair calls hiding the replacement work that pays the year.

The settings that matter, and the ones that do not

Google's defaults are set up for Google. Four are worth changing on day one.

• Turn off Search Partners and the Display Network. A new Search campaign opts you into both, and at roofing click prices they spend real money on placements that never produce an inspection.
• Target people in your area, not people interested in it. Presence only, one dropdown.
• Split into separate campaigns once you can afford it. Repair and storm want a different budget, different hours and a tighter radius than replacement. Ad groups share a budget. Campaigns do not.
• Pick a bidding strategy with something to aim at. Maximize clicks buys the cheapest traffic, and the cheapest roofing traffic is people pricing shingles. Move to a conversion based strategy once inspections record properly.

Not worth your time: bid adjustments by device, time of day, audience or demographic. Smart Bidding works all of that out on every auction and your adjustments are ignored.

Which roofing keywords actually bring in estimates?

A short list where every keyword names work you want, in the words a homeowner types. Not two hundred variations, which is how roofing accounts end up spending most of the budget on terms that never produced a job.

Two rules keep it honest. Every keyword names work you would send a crew to, and every keyword is what a homeowner would type rather than what a roofer would. Nobody searches ice and water shield. They search the stain on the ceiling.

A word on match types

Add keywords as phrase match, not broad. Broad lets Google show you against anything it decides is related, which in roofing reliably includes solar, siding, gutters and people after a spot on a crew. Start tight and open up a month or two in, once the negative list works.

One more. Roofing demand is spread across far more phrasings than most trades, so town terms matter more here than anywhere else. Run roof repair and roof repair [your city] as separate keywords. The one with a town in it is usually cheaper and closer to a booking.

What wastes roofing ad budget?

This is where a roofing Google Ads account leaks, and it leaks quietly at the highest click prices in local search. Six groups of negatives, added at campaign level so they apply everywhere. Build them before you turn the ads on, not after you have paid to discover them.

The mistake almost everyone makes with roofing negatives

Blocking the money words. Somebody searching roof replacement cost is not browsing, they are working out whether to call three roofers this week, and they are among the likeliest people in your account to book. Same for price, quote and estimate. Block the intent to do it themselves, not the intent to spend.

The second is negating a word without checking what else it appears in, and roofing is full of words that do two jobs. Negate estimate to keep out online cost estimate tools and you switch off free roof estimate, usually the best converting search in the account. Negate metal to stop people buying panels and you lose every metal roof installation search. Negate storm and you switch off your entire hail season. Add the phrase, not the word, whenever the word does more than one thing.

What does roofer PPC cost?

PPC for roofers has two separate costs and they get confused constantly. What you pay Google for the clicks, and what you pay somebody to manage the account.

The click

We are not going to print a cost per click here, because there is not an honest one to print. No published benchmark breaks roofing out on its own. The closest is WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, and its nearest category mixes roofing in with plumbing, HVAC and remodelling, so the average inside it belongs to a category rather than to roofing. Quoting it as a roofing figure would be inventing one, and plenty of roofing pages do exactly that.

To be explicit, because the figure gets quoted elsewhere as though it were trade specific: there is no roofing row in that report. The nearest one is a Home and Home Improvement average covering several trades at once, and it is not a roofing cost per click.

Your real number is free to look up and specific to you. Google's Keyword Planner shows the top of page bid range for your keywords in your towns, a live number out of the auction you are actually in. Your own account tells you the truth in about thirty days, and cost per signed roof in about ninety.

The management

A roofing PPC agency charges a monthly retainer, often a percentage of ad spend on top, usually with a minimum and frequently on a contract. What you buy is somebody reading the search terms report, adding negatives, moving bids and pausing keywords that stopped producing. It is real work, and it runs to a consistent set of rules, which is why software can now do it at a fixed price. Two questions are worth asking any roofing PPC company before you sign: how often somebody actually opens your account, and whether you keep it if you leave. You can see how that compares side by side.

There is the cost of a click, and there is the cost of somebody managing it. The second one you can change. An agency retainer runs around $1,500 a month, and myAgency is $150 a month with no contract.

How do you run a storm season?

This is the part of roofing that general Google Ads advice never covers, and in a hail market it decides the year.

When a hail or wind event lands, crews from outside the area buy the same keywords in your market within days. Click prices climb and an account that was comfortable last month is suddenly outbid on its own towns. It lasts a few weeks and then goes back to normal, which is the important half of the sentence. Two reactions are both wrong: switching the campaign off hands the event to the people who drove in for it, and raising bids across the account spends your replacement budget on tarping calls.

• Build the storm keywords before the weather. Hail damage roof inspection, storm damage roof repair, roof tarping. Set them up in a quiet month and leave the group live on a small budget. The window after an event is days, and a group created on the Monday is still learning on the Friday.
• Turn up one group, not the account. Move budget into the storm group, leave repair and replacement where they are, then turn it back down when the searches stop. They stop faster than most people expect.
• Target the damage, not the metro. A hail swath is a band a few miles wide, not a circle. Target the towns and postal codes that got hit rather than widening the radius, or you pay storm prices across a city where nothing happened.
• Say that you are local. Homeowners get their door knocked for a month after a storm and most are wary of it by the second week. Local, licensed, and here next year if the warranty is needed is the strongest thing a roofing ad can say, and the crews who drove in cannot say it.

One caution, and it is not really about advertising. Do not run ads that promise an insurance outcome, and do not advertise covering or waiving a deductible. Many states prohibit it outright.

How much should you budget, and how far should you drive?

Two questions with one answer: buy enough clicks in a small enough area to learn something, and set the area by what the job pays.

Work backwards from the job, not from the click. Roofing clicks are expensive and roofing jobs are large, so a cost per booked inspection that would be alarming for a service call can be comfortable for a replacement. What matters is what a signed roof is worth to you and how many inspections it takes to sign one. Count that second number before you set a budget.

A budget buying two or three clicks a day tells you nothing. Fund repair and replacement properly in a tight area rather than running all five groups thinly across a county, and add the rest once those two produce.

How far to advertise

• Repair and leaks: tight. Small jobs, and the drive eats the margin. Your normal working radius, no wider.
• Replacement and specialty: wider. A full roof justifies an hour in the truck, and this is the group where the next county pays for itself.
• Storm work: shaped, not round. Follow the damage. Towns and postal codes, not a radius drawn from your yard.

Roofing is seasonal, so the budget should be too

Flat monthly spend is the wrong shape for this trade. Replacement demand climbs through spring, holds through the fall and falls away in deep winter in cold markets. Repair demand does close to the opposite and spikes with the first hard rain or the first thaw. Storm demand ignores the calendar. Budget for the season you are in rather than dividing the year by twelve, and hold something back for the week the weather does something.

What should the ad and the landing page say?

The ad has one job: repeat what they searched for and tell them when you can get on the roof. Most roofing ads fail on the second half.

Put the work and the town in the headline, because somebody searching roof repair in Tulsa should see roof repair and Tulsa. Then say when the inspection can happen. Free inspection this week beats free estimates, and a day beats an adjective.

Then the things that make somebody call instead of going back to the results: your license number, that you carry insurance, your manufacturer certification if you hold one, the warranty, how long you have been in town, and financing on replacements. Financing moves more homeowners on a full roof than any other line in the ad, because the objection is rarely the roof, it is the timing of the money. Skip best roofer and quality workmanship. Every competing ad says it.

The page has to hold up its end. Phone number at the top, tappable. The work they searched for in the first line rather than four scrolls down. Your towns written out. Photos of roofs on streets people recognise, which beats stock photography by a distance in this trade. And a short form for the people who will not phone, which on replacement traffic is more of them than you think.

What does month one actually look like?

Roofing takes longer to read than most trades, because the job that pays for the month can sign six weeks after the click that started it. Knowing the shape stops you switching it off in week two, which is when most roofers do.

Two habits matter more than the rest. Read the search terms report, the actual list of what people typed, not the dashboard summary. And write the source on the job sheet when a roof signs, because at a six week lag the account will not connect that contract back to the click by itself.

That is a useful hour every week, and somebody has to spend it. If you would rather it was not you, myAgency spends it for you and tells you what changed.

What does Google Ads management for roofers cost?

Everything above is genuinely how to do it properly. It is also an evening of setup and an hour every week forever, and you are on a roof.

That is what we built myAgency for. You connect your Google Ads account and it creates the campaign for you: the ad groups, the keywords, the negative list, the service area, the ads. Creating it, optimizing it and managing it all takes under five minutes. After that it runs on its own, twice a day. It reads the search terms you would otherwise have read on a Sunday night, blocks the people pricing their own shingles and the ones after a spot on a crew, tunes the keywords producing inspections, and writes every change down in plain English.

No agency. Running Google Ads for roofing companies has meant a monthly retainer for somebody to log into your account a couple of times, usually on a contract. myAgency is $150 a month, no contract, no setup fee.

And no dashboard to learn. Google Ads has hundreds of settings and no instructions, which is the real reason most roofing companies either overpay an agency or leave a half-built campaign running at the most expensive click prices in local search. The tool a lot of people still call AdWords has not got simpler since it was renamed. You need the phone to ring with somebody who has a stain spreading across their ceiling.

Your roofing campaign, built in five minutes

Connect your Google Ads account and myAgency creates, optimizes and manages the whole thing for you. Then you go back to the job.

Build my roofing campaign

$150 a month, and after that you only open Google Ads if you want to. Already running ads? start with what your account is doing now.

Other trades we cover

The same guide, written for a different job. Each covers the structure, the keywords, the negatives and what month one looks like for that trade. The full set is on the industries hub.

• Google Ads for dentists. Some of the most expensive clicks in local search, and a lot of the traffic that looks dental is job hunters, students and home remedies.
• Google Ads for plumbers. Emergency work and DIY research share almost the same words, so a lot of the budget goes to people who are about to fix it themselves.
• Google Ads for HVAC. Demand inverts twice a year, so cooling and heating belong in separate campaigns from day one. Budget is a campaign setting, not an account one.
• Google Ads for pest control. The season decides the search, so the calendar runs the campaign. A recurring contract and a one-time callout look identical in the keyword list.
• Google Ads for junk removal. The word junk covers six unrelated jobs, and this is the one trade where the cost of doing the work changes with the search term, so a cheap lead can still lose money.
• Google Ads for electricians. Apprenticeship and licensing searches are heavier here than in any other trade, and panel, EV and generator work closes weeks after the click.
• Google Ads for mobile detailing. Most detailing searches are people learning to detail their own car, or heading for a cheap drive-through wash.