Google Ads for Roofing Businesses: A Complete Guide

What Are Roofing Google Ads?

Roofing Google Ads is a digital marketing strategy in which roofing companies compete for the few ad spots available on Google properties—YouTube, affiliated applications and websites, and the Google search engine.

To be eligible for ad spots, roofing companies pay an amount determined by multiple factors, such as the level of competition for their specific keyword or target audience.

Google Ads have a pay structure divided into three buckets:

• Pay per click (or PPC): You pay whenever someone clicks on your ad.

• Pay per impression (or PPM): You pay when someone views your ad.

• Pay per lead (or PPL): You pay for each phone call, message, or job booking you receive from your ad.

How do Google Ads work?

Like other pay-per-click advertising channels, Google Ads operates using a bidding system:

• Roofing companies pick specific keywords or search terms relevant to their particular services, business goals, and target audience.

• Next, they pick a maximum bid—the highest amount they're willing to pay for a click, impression, or lead.

• They craft the ad copy and content for the target destination—website or landing page.

• Finally, they launch their campaign.

Whenever a prospect searches for a specific keyword or visits a website affiliated with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google evaluates each ad’s relevance to that keyword to determine eligibility. Every eligible roofing ad enters into a lightning-fast auction. 

Google's algorithm then picks the winning ads and determines their position using an ad rank, which it computes using four factors:

• Bid amount: The highest amount you’re willing to pay for each ad click.

• Landing page and ad quality: How valuable and useful are your ad and landing page to customers? How do they compare with other roofing ads participating in the auction?

• Overall search context: The searcher's location, query, time of search, device type, and other content or ads on the results page.

• Predicted impact of ad assets (formerly called ad extensions) on performance: Ad assets are additional information you include in your ad. This includes phone numbers, callouts, location, website links, etc. Google computes their predicted impact on your ad performance to determine your placement.

Find out more about ad rank criteria.

Optimizing your ads for each of the above-listed criteria boosts your chances of appearing in the scarce ad spots available and snagging the first position.

What Are The Benefits of Using Google Ads for Roofing?

Google’s domination of the search engine market makes Google Ads the default marketing channel for business owners. Eighty-seven percent of customers also prefer searching for businesses on the platform. 

However, one may ask: why pay to appear on the Google search engine when you can also use SEO strategies to appear in organic listings without spending a dime?

The benefits of paying for Google Ads far outweigh the costs for many reasons. Here are some of them:

1. Access to prospects: Advertising on Google Ads grants access to a vast pool of potential customers actively using the Google search engine to find roofing businesses.

2. Immediate results: On average, attempting to earn a position in organic listings using search engine optimization strategies (SEO) takes three to six months. For context, that means losing potential roofing leads to other roofers for the same period.

Conversely, Google Ads can start generating leads the second you launch them. All you need to do is use the right keywords, strategies, and targeting options.

1. Precision: Google Ads boost your campaign’s precision by targeting prospects using their hobbies and online activity. You can also use Google Ads to re-acquire leads who performed a specific action on your website without booking an appointment.

Targeting such high-quality leads boosts conversion rates, maximizing your ad spend.

1. Measurable: By linking your Google Ads account with Google Analytics, you can measure your ad’s performance down to the clicks and traffic it generates. You can also automatically use ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro Ads to attribute each job to the source campaign.

2. Cost-effective: Google’s recent economic impact report shows that advertisers earn $8 from Google Search and Ads for every $1 they spend on Google Ads. That’s an ROI of 70 percent—more than with several other digital marketing channels.

3. Effortless setup: You can easily set up Google Ads using video tutorials, guides, and in-app tooltips.

What Are The Drawbacks of Using Google Ads for Roofing?

Here are some potential drawbacks of Google Ads for roofing companies:

• Ballooning ad costs: Within the last quarter of 2023, Google Search CPCs increased by nine percent, leading to a 17 percent increase in ad spend. This is due to increasing competition for keywords since more businesses recognize the benefits of Google Ads.

• Ad fatigue: Customers are increasingly wary of digital ads. Therefore, they either block them out entirely using ad blockers or avoid them in favor of organic results.  

• Profitability requires time and skill: As we pointed out earlier, it’s easy to set up a Google Ads campaign. However, creating a profitable one requires significant investment in research, running A/B tests, understanding analytics reports, and so on.

Bear in mind that these drawbacks in no way invalidate the use of Google Ads to generate leads. Instead, they demonstrate the importance of combining Google Ads with other channels, such as social media advertising, search marketing, and content marketing, to compensate for its drawbacks.

What Types of Google Ads Are Used in Roofing Marketing Campaigns?

Google Ads are divided into nine categories, each with multiple formats and types. However, for this article, we’ll limit our discussion to the top four Google Ads types roofing companies use to generate leads. They include the following:

Let’s explore them further.

1. Search ads

You often encounter these text-based ads at the top and bottom of Google search result pages (SERPs).

Search ads resemble organic search results, distinguished only by the “Sponsored” tag. They also contain site links, call extensions, location extensions, and other additional ad assets. 

Google search ads operate on a pay-per-click basis, where advertisers pay a specific amount whenever someone clicks on their ad. 

Google search ads have higher costs than display ads. However, their conversion rates compensate for the expenses since they are triggered only by purchase-intent keywords such as “roofing company Illinois.”

2. Display ads

Notice how, after you searched for "best shingles," ads for roofing materials started popping up on other websites? Those are display ads, a form of online advertising involving rich media ads or banners to promote your services across websites and applications registered on GDN.

They cost far less than other types of Google ads on this list since internet users rarely click on them. They are also cost-effective as you only pay when someone visits your website through them.

Display ads are ideal for building awareness or reacquiring leads who have interacted with your brand (e.g., visited your website or clicked on a social media ad).

3. Instream ads

These video ads play during or before videos hosted on YouTube or affiliate websites and applications. They are either five-second skippable ads or unskippable videos of 15–30 seconds in length.

Instream ads are helpful in earning impressions and building brand awareness.

4. Local Services Ads

Local Services Ads (LSAs) are a unique Google Ads offering that contain three high-ranking roofing companies, their key details, and a map insert with pins showing their physical locations.

Triggered by local-intent keywords like “roofing company Alaska,” these ads allow homeowners to call or message companies directly without visiting a landing page or website. Removing this extra step of visiting a separate webpage helps to increase conversions.

LSAs are an excellent lead-generation tool since they take up valuable real estate on SERPs and appear only for local-intent keywords. Additionally, they eliminate the disappointment of interacting with a lead and finding out they are outside your service area when they’re about to book an appointment.

ServiceTitan’s Local Services Ads integration helps companies empower searchers to book appointments directly from search. Every job booking automatically flows into your Service Scheduling dashboard, allowing you to follow up on leads.

Companies that have used the integration reported a higher conversion rate on booked leads and lower acquisition costs.

How Can You Create a Roofing Google Ads Campaign?

Creating a Google Ads campaign is a six-step process, starting with defining your goal, continuing with keyword research, and terminating with performance tracking and optimization. Here’s a breakdown of the different steps.

Let’s explore them in more detail.

1. Define your campaign’s goal

Determining your goal before starting your Google Ads campaign sets you up for success. It ensures you pick the right ad type and format, achieve business objectives, and gauge progress.

The goals you set depend on the stage of your business, available resources, and the maturity stage of your marketing operation. Examples of roofing Google Ads goals include the following:

• Grow website traffic

• Generate free-quote requests

• Grow leads

Tie every goal to a business objective so your campaign generates accurate business results. For example, if you're growing brand awareness, you can pick generating website traffic as your goal.

Consider using the SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound) framework when outlining your goals. For example, here’s the result of using the SMART framework to reframe the goal of generating traffic.

Increase website traffic by 20 percent in the next two months to build brand awareness and increase lead generation. Track the traffic generated using SEO tools such as Google Analytics.

Consider using ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing software to track your campaign’s performance using intuitive dashboards. You can also see the areas generating the most traffic and revenue, allowing you to optimize for revenue.

2. Research keywords

Keyword research is the cornerstone of every successful Google Ads campaign. Picking the right keywords ensures that your ads are activated by business-relevant search queries and reach the right audience, maximizing ROI and limiting ad spend.

Google’s autocomplete and people-also-ask sections are great keyword repositories. Input a seed keyword, copy the predictions displayed, then scroll down to the people-also-asked suggestion box and copy the questions.

However, to save time, use Google’s free Keyword Planner. The tool allows you to search for keywords using a seed phrase or scraping competitor sites to discover what they are ranking for.

How does it work?

Log into your Keyword Planner and click Tools > Planning > Discover new keywords.

If you already have a seed phrase, select ‘Start with keywords’ on the following display and enter it in the search bar provided. You could also enter your site’s URL in the smaller search bar so the system removes services you don’t offer. Then, wait a few seconds as the system generates a list of related keywords.

If you’re using a competitor's page, select ‘Start with a website.’ Then, enter the website’s URL and select ‘Use the entire site’ or ‘Use only this page.’ Then, click the ‘Get results’ button to see all the keywords the specific page or entire website ranks for.

Regardless of your method, pay close attention to the metrics displayed on the results page—average monthly share, competition, ad impression share, etc. You’ll use these metrics to pick an optimum maximum bid amount that keeps you competitive without draining your ad budget.

However, if you already have a list of target keywords, you can access advanced keyword metrics like clicks, impressions, cost, click-through rate, and average cost per click (CPC). How?

Select ‘Get search volume and forecasts’ on your Keyword Planner’s homepage. Then, input your keyword list. You can separate them with commas or simply list them one on each line.

You’ll see each keyword and their respective metrics on the next page. This data is valuable for running ads, as it helps you predict your campaign’s impact on the business.

For an effective roofing Google Ads campaign, combine both high- and low-volume keywords. This will ensure your ads generate lots of traffic, increasing the odds of achieving high conversions.

Also, investigate each keyword’s search intent to ensure it aligns with your goals. All keywords belong to three intent buckets:

• Top-of-funnel keywords have very low conversion rates since the searcher is likely not looking to buy immediately. They are ideal for attracting cold leads. Examples include ‘Which roof type is best,’ ‘Types of roofing materials,’ and ‘Best roofing materials.’

• Mid-funnel keywords, as the name suggests, are neither low- nor high-converting. They are ideal for attracting warm leads. Examples include ‘Roofing quotes,’ ‘Roof repair cost estimate,’ and ‘Metal vs. shingle.’

• Bottom-of-funnel keywords are used by searchers ready to hire a roofer. Therefore, they are ideal for attracting hot leads. Examples include ‘Best roofers [input location],’ ‘Emergency roofer [input location],’ and ‘Same day roofing.’

The intent of your chosen keywords should align with your business goals. For example, top-of-funnel keywords are meant to generate traffic you can nurture into sales. Conversely, target bottom-of-funnel keywords if your goal is to generate immediate job bookings.

3. Decide your advertising budget

Setting a budget caps your ad spend within the limits of your current financial status and overall marketing budget. 

Google Ads campaign budgets depend on the keyword CPC, lead acquisition goals, and the average value of each job booking. For example, it's okay to spend $20 advertising a service that generates $400 for each job booking. Still, it’s not okay to spend the same amount on another service with an average revenue of $15.

To calculate your budget, sum up the average CPCs of the keywords you wish to target and multiply the result by 30.4 (the average number of days per month) to arrive at your monthly budget. However, run test campaigns or use UpCity’s PPC ad budget formula for a more accurate idea of your budget.

First, use the following formula to calculate the number of customers (NOC) you need to reach your revenue goal.

Use the result to then calculate your ad budget as follows:

CSR and tech conversion rate represent the percentage of leads who become customers after interacting with your techs and support staff.

After picking a budget, setting your maximum bid is next.

Brandon Doyle, director of marketing for Blue Corona (a full-service digital marketing agency for trade companies), says, “If you're comfortable spending your entire budget, I recommend [you] maximize leads. But if you're saying, ‘Hey, I want to be sensitive to how much I'm paying for a lead,’ that's where you might take that max-per-lead play when it comes to your bid strategy.”

Learn more: Explore more strategies for picking an appropriate bidding strategy. 

4. Build your landing page

The landing page’s role is to convince the visitor to take the required action—book an appointment, download a research report, request a free quote, etc. Therefore, it is essential to optimize it for conversions.

During your landing page design, prioritize user experience. That means the design should be uncluttered, with appealing visuals and concise copy. Avoid lengthy text blocks, ensure the buttons are large and clickable on small screens, and add a clear call to action.

This increases your ad quality score, which can place your ad in a pole position to outrank others.

Strategically place your target keywords within your landing page copy and fulfill their search intent and the promise you made in the ad copy. This will ensure you meet visitors’ expectations, increasing your quality score.

Finally, authentic customer testimonials and a click-to-call button should be included to quash prospects’ objections and encourage them to book an appointment immediately.

Pro tip: Place your target keyword in your landing page’s headline to immediately signal to any visitor that they’re in the right place and will find what convinced them to click on the ad.

5. Create your ad

Well-crafted ad copy and attractive creatives get prospects to click on your ad, increasing the chances of conversion. Google Ads' algorithm also considers ad copy quality to determine each ad’s eligibility to appear for a search query and ranking.

As with your landing page, include your target keywords naturally in your ad copy, state your value proposition, and match the prospect’s search intent. The display URL—the link to the destination landing page or website—should align with your target keyword. For example, the display URL for an ad with the keyword “best roofing company” will be www.xcompany.com/best-roofing-company.

Furthermore, exhaust the recommended word count and use ad assets—site links, callouts, and structured snippets—to occupy a larger portion of the viewport. This can convince prospects to click on your ads instead of others.

Finally, if you’re running Display ads, your creatives must be in JPG, PNG, or GIF file formats and stay below 150KB. In terms of dimensions, consider using any of Google's top-performing image dimensions:

• 300x 250

• 336 x 280

• 728 x 90

• 300 x 600

• 320 x 100

6. Track your campaign

Launching your ad campaign is not the end of the journey. Ongoing performance tracking and optimization are key to maximizing your ad spend by strategically allocating resources to high-performing ads.

When tracking your campaign’s performance, prioritize the following metrics:

• Click-through rate (CTR): The ratio or percentage of clicks in relation to the number of times it’s displayed. Review your ad copy whenever CTR is low.

• Conversion rate: The percentage of people who booked a job compared to those who visited your landing page. Spruce up your landing page copy whenever conversion rates fall below the roofing industry average. 

• Impressions: The number of times Google displays your ad to prospects. A low impression could mean you set the wrong maximum bid.

• Cost per acquisition and cost per lead (CPA and CPL): The average amount you pay for every customer (CPA) or lead (CPL). Keep both metrics below your revenue per job.

• Ad quality score: Your ad’s quality compared to others. Monitor your ad quality score in your Google Ads account dashboard.

Free tools like Google Analytics and Google Keyword Planner help track these metrics. However, since they fail to track revenue, there’s the tendency to optimize your campaign for vanity metrics with no real business impact.

Johnny Wenzel, senior manager of marketing operations for ServiceTitan Marketing Pro – Ads, recently explained this revenue attribution dilemma in a webinar.

“Google tracks website clicks or phone calls as conversions, whether they correlate to revenue or not,” he says.

“For example, a customer searching for a specific competitor may receive an ad for your business instead. They click to call but then end the call once they realize they called the wrong company. If it didn’t cost much to earn this phone call, Google tracks a low cost per conversion or cost per lead.”

That’s not all; it gets even worse.

“Google will see this (the wrong attribution) as a winning campaign and reallocate more of its resources to that campaign because it has a better cost per conversion,” Wenzel says.

Fortunately, ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro – Ads resolves this revenue attribution dilemma.

Using integrations with Google platforms and dynamic number insertion that assigns unique numbers to each campaign, the platform attributes each job booking, call, and form fill to the source campaign. It also reveals other performance metrics like job booking rates, average job value, and leads generated.

This allows you to track each campaign’s revenue in real time.

Another key feature of ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro – Ads is the Ad Optimizer.

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the tool uses insights from ServiceTitan’s conversion data to train Google to display your ads to only quality leads—people actively looking for a roofing company to hire.

Companies who use this tool lower their cost per lead and increase their campaign’s ROI. For example, companies enrolled in the product’s beta-testing phase reported:

• 2.9X increase in average Google Ads budget ROI

• 40X the cost spent on Ads Optimiser

• Average order value increase of 65 percent

• Average order size increase of 60 percent

Additionally, Proximo Marketing, a marketing agency for trade companies, recently used Ad Optimizer to run a digital marketing campaign for a plumbing company in a month. The result?

Lead quality increased from 44 to 60 percent, corresponding to a 100 percent better return on investment. This caused Senior Account Manager Liz Soto to say the tool’s capability is “next level.”

What Are The Best Practices for Running Google Ads for a Roofing Company?

As promised, here are some tips and strategies for running a profitable Google Ads campaign.

1. Analyze your competitors

Running successful Google Ads campaigns requires consistent iterations, especially since customer behavior and industry standards are always changing. Monitoring competitors' actions is one way to stay ahead of the curve and understand what works. You can use these insights to improve your campaigns and surpass competitors.

For starters, create a list of your top 10 competitors. Then, find out the keywords their ads and landing pages currently rank for using specialized SEO tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs. 

Pay close attention to the keywords your competitors (particularly the established ones) consistently use. This will prove that they are profitable.

2. Optimize your landing page

The best ads fall flat without a well-optimized landing page that converts the resulting traffic into appointments. Low-quality landing pages also decrease your quality score, leading to low revenue and high CPA and CPL costs.

Here are four equally important landing page optimization strategies:

• Ensure page-ad alignment: Mirror the offer, messaging, and value proposition used in your ads on the linked landing page.

• Use one CTA per landing page: Even if you use multiple CTAs, ensure they prompt users to perform the same action.

• Leverage trust signals: Use testimonials, certification badges, and money-back guarantees to minimize customers' distrust when leaving their personal information.

• Reduce page loading speed: Increase your page's loading speed to reduce bounce rates—the phenomenon where visitors leave your page without engaging with the content. Use a CDN (content delivery network), switch to a dedicated server, compress visuals, and minimize JavaScript and CSS files.

3. Target negative keywords

Negative keywords are words you add to your Google Ad campaign, so it's not triggered by low-quality, irrelevant, and non-revenue-generating search terms. Adding negative keywords to your campaign can boost CTRs and reduce ad costs.

Examples of negative keywords include the following.

• Keywords containing competitors’ brand names.

• Keywords related to other industries.

• Keywords generating clicks without conversions.

To include negative keywords in your campaign, follow these steps:

• Navigate to the Campaigns tab on the left side of your Google Ads homepage.

• Click on Audiences, keywords, and content.

• Choose ‘Search keywords’ and click ‘Negative search keywords’ in the preceding display interface.

• Next, select the “+ Negative keywords” button, define whether it applies to the overall campaign or is restricted to a specific ad group, and click the save button.

4. Target specific locations

You can use the location ad extension to include your physical location address at the bottom of your Google ad. Here’s an example.

Prospects can click on the ad extension and find directions to your physical location. This convenience can help prospects contact or visit your location, generating revenue.

5. A/B test your ads

A/B test is a quantitative experimental approach for discovering elements impacting ad performance. 

It involves creating two or more ad variants differing in an element (e.g., button color and copy length) and randomly displaying them to selected audience segments. This helps you identify ads with higher conversions, improving your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Follow these steps to create and run A/B tests:

• Create a hypothesis like ‘large CTA buttons convert better.’

• Select the appropriate element to test your hypothesis, which is button size.

• Create multiple versions of your ads differing in the selected element.

• Launch the ad variants and track their performance.

What Tools Can Roofers Use to Run Google Ads Campaigns?

Picking the right marketing tool is vital to creating and running a successful Google Ads campaign. Here are some examples.

• Keyword Planner: A free Google tool for finding keywords alongside their cost per click and estimated search volume. It’s also a valuable tool for discovering the keywords competitor pages rank for.

• Google Analytics: An analytics tool that produces reports highlighting customer behavior across the marketing funnel. It also reveals visitors’ on-page behavior, including the buttons they clicked, page sections they visited the most, etc.

• Google Tag Manager: A platform that allows users to create, store, and use code blocks that track user behavior without altering your website’s source code.

• ServiceTitan’s Ads Optimizer: An AI-powered tool that analyzes ServiceTitan conversion data and uses the result to train Google’s LLMs to display your ads to high-quality leads.

The Bottom Line

By now, you’re equipped with the right information to set up a Google Ads campaign. Remember to define your goal from the outset and align it with a business objective like revenue generation or growing brand awareness.

To optimize your campaign for revenue, regularly monitor its performance using roofing company software like ServiceTitan. The software can also streamline other essential business operations to grow your business.

ServiceTitan is cloud-based software that helps roofing companies automate essential business processes such as scheduling, customer management, and dispatching. Thousands of contractors nationwide have used it to increase their revenue by 25 percent in just one year.