PPC for roofing contractors: The ultimate strategy
Itching to learn the proper pay-per-click advertising blueprint to take your roofing company to the next level online?
We know the roofing industry. And we've been doing PPC for over 15 years. It's a lethal combination.
This guide is everything you'll need to get more clicks and generate more leads from your PPC advertising campaigns.
- Get an extreme advantage over competitors with Google Ads
- Spend less money & convert more visitors into quality leads
Don't have time to read the whole guide?
Watch our free PPC for Roofers webinar below!
Table of Contents
A Quick Note for Readers
We literally wrote the book on Internet Marketing including a large section on how to do roofing pay-per-click advertising properly. We’ve broken down the ads process for roofing contractors in this article in a very detailed manner, but for more info grab a copy of our new book!
As always, if you need a roofing PPC services company to review your website and create a new blueprint to get your ad tactics on point.
Schedule a free discovery call today!
What is PPC?
SEO is more of a long term strategy and key to the long term viability of your business, but once you’ve got a handle on it, it’s going to be time to start looking at paid online marketing such as:
- Google Ads Pay-Per-Click campaigns
- Bing Ads Pay-Per-Click campaigns
- Facebook/Instagram Ad Campaigns
These advertising initiatives can produce quick, fast, and effective results if done right. They are a way to make your business appear right at top of search results and within the social media feeds of your target audience at the click of a button as well as build a long term faucet of leads that you can turn on and off at will.
Successful Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaigns for Roofing Companies
- Scenario 1 is that they’ve already spent thousands of dollars with Google Ads and got very little or no return on investment - essentially just throwing money down the drain.
- Scenario 2 is that they see how much it costs per click for roofing advertising, sometimes between $25-50 per click, and can’t fathom spending that much for advertising.
Most PPC Campaigns fail because business owners fail
to understand how the AdWords platform actually works
to convert visitors into leads.
- Doesn’t have the main headline about Emergency Roof Leak Repair
- Doesn’t give them incentive to call now to get their roof repaired
- Doesn’t give them a reason to choose your company over others
- E.g. Group all “Roof Leak Repair” keywords into one ad group together, all “roof replacement” keywords in another ad group
- Each ad group should have its own set of ad copy that talks specifically about those services
- Each ad group and ad should send the users that click to a targeted and relevant landing page on your website that only gives them information and benefits about those specific services/keywords
The Real Benefit of Roofing Contractor Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The Different Pay Per Click Platforms
There are a lot of PPC platforms out there, however the two main ones are Google Ads (AdWords) and Bing Ads.These are the two we focus on and use in every roofing contractor marketing campaign that we do.
With Google Ads, when you run campaigns your ads will be served on Google’s search network as well as some of their partners if you choose.
With Bing Ads, your ads will be served on the Bing search engine as well as Yahoo and several other partners.
Which Platform Should You Use?
So where should you invest your budget in pay per click advertising? Well, we recommend investing it in both Google and Bing’s platforms.
Google owns more than 80% of the search market share, but Bing is a hidden gem that not as many people advertise on and can serve very good results.
That said, our strategy is to invest 85-90% of our roofing client budgets for PPC in Google Ads and the other 10-15% into Bing Ads.
This gives us a good chance to see how each platform responds as well as brings different demographics to the table. The cost on Bing is going to be much less than Google as well.
How the Process Works
Let’s talk about how the Google Ads auction process works. There’s a lot of incorrect and misunderstood information out there. A lot of people think that the AdWords auction process is solely based on the cost per click.
They’ll tell themselves, well if I just bid higher, I’ll be in the #1 spot and then I’ll get more clicks and leads.
However, we need to go back to Google and the fact that they want to serve relevant results to their users. Because of this, they can’t just let the highest bidder get the top position. That’s why they use what they call the “quality score” to determine results of paid ads on their platform.
Google makes more revenue if their advertisers get clicks, and in order for that to be more effective, they need serve extremely relevant ads to their users.
Quality Score
So what is quality score and why does it matter? Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. It is used to determine your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process. Your Quality Score depends on multiple factors, including:
- Your ad click-through rate or CTR
- The relevance of each keyword to the ad group it’s in
- Relevance of your ad text
- AdWords historical performance
No one outside of Google really knows how much each factor is weighted in their Quality Score algorithm, but it is widely known that click through rate is one of the most important parts of it. When people who see your ad click on it, this indicates to Google that your ad was relevant and super helpful to users, which is exactly what they want.
How Roofers Can Get Fantastic ROI with PPC Advertising
How can you really get this right? How can you maximize the effectiveness of your pay-per-click marketing strategy?
The first thing I recommend is setting up ad groups based on specific services. I’m going to break those down for you as we go.
I want you to write a specific and compelling text ad that matches the keywords or those groups of keywords.
Then I want you to land the traffic that comes through pay-per- click for each ad group on a specific page of the website – not the home page, but a very specific page that matches what they typed in.
If you do this, you can have a better quality score, and you’re going to be a lot more successful with your AdWords campaign.
Here’s how we setup and run PPC campaigns effectively:
Know Your Budget and Your Numbers
The first thing you need to decide before even starting the setup of your PPC campaigns is knowing what your monthly ad spend budget is going to be.
This is crucial to have a number up front because then you’ll know where your priorities should be in terms of keyword research.
For roofing contractors, even in smaller cities, we recommend having a MINIMUM ad spend budget of $1,000.00 per month.
Anything lower than that in the roofing industry will be very difficult to work with as well as just won’t be effective because your data will be limited.
In larger cities like Houston, Los Angeles, etc. $1000 won’t cut it though.
When cost per click can rise above $30-40 each for some keywords, $1,000 is not a lot and can disappear in less than 30-35 clicks.
It’s all about ROI in the end. If you spend $1,000 and get one roof replacement job out of it that nets you $4,000 in profit, was spending that $1,000 worth it? I’d say yes every time, you just quadrupled your investment.
Here’s some average figures to go on:
- The average conversion rate of an Ads campaign that we run is around 10% -- that means that for every 10 clicks to your landing page, 1 might turn into a valid lead. That said, the average is usually lower than this, we’ve just perfected the roofing ads over a lot of trial and error.
- Clicks in smaller populations for the top few spots can run $10-15/click, while in larger cities like Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, clicks can run from $25-40/click.
Know Your Sales Numbers
It is crucial to know your sales numbers for Google Ads to get an idea of what could work for you.
Let’s say for every 10 leads you get, you close 3 of them as jobs on average. A 30% closing percentage.
Let’s say you have a $2,000.00 monthly ad budget. Your average cost per click is $20.
$2,000 / $20 = 100 clicks
So you’ll get 100 clicks for your $2,000 budget.
Then calculate the conversion to lead percentage, which for us is usually around 10%.
.10 * 100 = 10 leads.
So on average, you’ll get 10 quality leads for $2,000, about $200/lead.
Now say your close percentage is 30%. So you close 3 of those 10 leads into roofing jobs.
Let’s say on average you make $3,000 profit per job. $3,000 x 3 = $9,000.
Congratulations, you just spent $2,000 to earn $9,000. Thats a great return on investment.
We're here to help make that a reality.Now these numbers are probably very conservative, at least from our perspective. But you can see how much opportunity there is, especially if you know your numbers ahead of time.
How to Set Up the Perfect Roofer AdWords Campaign
Want to dominate Google Ads (AdWords)? Here’s the necessary steps you need to follow to setup a campaign that will generate non-stop leads:
Keyword Research
Now it’s time to figure out the keywords that you want to bid on. There’s a number of tools you can use to find keywords:
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
Or you can head over to our roofing keywords page we created for you.
It’s important to know the services that you want to bid on for advertising and group them accordingly with similar keywords.
So let’s say we want to bid on general roofing keywords in your city, metal roofing, and roof replacement keywords.
I’ve already found a number of keywords that would work grouped together:
- 1. General Roofing Keywords + City: roofing (city), roofing contractor (city), roofing companies (city), roofers (city), roofing services (city)
- 2. Metal Roofing Keywords: Metal roofers, metal roofing contractors, metal roofing companies, metal roofing services, metal roofing
- 3. Roof Replacement Keywords: Roof replacement, roof replacement contractors, roof replacement service, roof replacement estimate
These are just examples, but you can see how each is grouped with similar terms. These eventually will form your ad groups.
So right now, take out a piece of paper or open a spreadsheet and start doing research based upon what you want to be found for and group each set of keywords separately.
Negative Keywords
This is one of the #1 reasons why businesses blow through their ad budgets so quickly.
You need to put negative keywords in your ad campaigns.
This tells Google that your ad should not show if it contains one of the words you mention.
For roofers, there are HUNDREDS of keywords you don’t want ads to show for.
For example:
- Supplies, supplier, buy, bulk, sales
- Jobs, careers, employment, full time, part time
- Craigslist, Home Depot
- All of your top competitors
You don’t want your ads showing for any of these related terms because it will cost you money and you won’t get leads.
There’s a lot of people looking for roofing work as well as having lots of your competitors with the word “roofing” in their names.
Make sure you make an extensive list to place in the negative keywords list in your ads campaigns.
Roofing Ad Groups & Bidding
For roofing, what ad groups should you set up? You can go a lot deeper on this than you can imagine, but for the sake of this example, I’m going to make it simple.
General roofing services: So they typed in “roofer” or “roofing” “roofing company,” “roofing contractor” etc.
All of that can be grouped into a general roofing services ad group Then there’s roofing terms with Geo-modifiers. These ad groups would be very city or state dependent. They would be similar to general roofing but have a city appended to the end of the keywords.
It’s important to keep these separate from just general terms.
Then there’s emergency roofing terms. Somebody is in a much different mental state when they have water pouring through their roof and need help right away. They can be typing, “emergency roof repair,” “emergency roofing,” “24 hour emergency roofing services,” or “after hours roofer”.
These are just some examples of ad groups and how you can put keywords together, but the key to remember is:
Keep Similar Service Keywords together in the Same Ad Group
Types of Keywords to Put into Ad Groups:
In Google Ads, there are several variations of keywords you can use in the ad group:
It’s important to realize the difference.
We almost never use Broad match keywords because there are too many issues and variables with broad match that can cost you money quickly.
We typically stick to broad match modifier, phrase match, and exact match.
So for example in our ad group for “roofing contractor chicago” terms, here’s what each of those would look like:
+roofing +contractor +chicago
Broad match modifier says that those keywords with a plus sign in front of them could show an ad for any search term as long as those are in the search keyword. They can contain close variants of a word, but not synonyms, and be in any order.
So if someone typed in “I need a chicago roofing contractor” the broad match modifier would show the ad, because the words are all included.
“roofing contractor chicago”
Broad match modifier says that those keywords with a plus sign in front of them could show an ad for any search term as long as those are in the search keyword. They can contain close variants of a word, but not synonyms, and be in any order.
So if someone typed in “I need a chicago roofing contractor” the broad match modifier would show the ad, because the words are all included.
“roofing contractor chicago”
Phrase match uses the exact phrase we outline but can include words before or after in the search query. However, everything must be in the same order.
Example: best roofing contractor chicago IL — the phrase match keyword would show in our ad group because it contains “roofing contractor chicago”
[roofing contractor chicago]
Exact match means exactly that – it will only show for that exact term that you wrote, or very close variations of it, e.g. roofing contractors chicago
Our strategy is to put each of these variations of a search phrase in each ad group, exact match should have higher bids that broad match. This allows us to cover each and every keyword related to those terms.
Example of what an ad group with phrase and exact match looks like:
Campaign Settings
Campaign Goal
Select New Campaign, it will ask for a goal for your campaign. We will want to select “Leads” as the goal.
Title Your Campaign
if this campaign is about Roofing, we suggest calling it that. We usually run separate campaigns for different service types altogether, but if it’s related to roofing in general, we will have 1 campaign titled roofing
Campaign Type
Next we’ll be looking at selecting a campaign type. We always recommend start off with a “Search” campaign. These are the standard ads that will appear in Google’s main search results. There are a number of other options which we do use for our clients in more advanced stages, but if you want results fast, search is the way to go.
Locations
This is an important one. If you have a designated service area, whether it be a radius from a city, certain cities, zip codes, counties, this is where you put that information. Be as specific as possible. If you want to exclude certain cities, make sure you do this.
Networks
In the networks section, there’s a few options. We always want to run our first campaign on the “Search Network”. There is a check box that gets automatically selected to “Include Google search partners”. We recommend unchecking this box as we’ve discovered that the search network just isn’t as effective at conversions. Same goes with unchecking the “Include Google Display Network”.
Under location options, Google automatically selects the option that says Target People in,
or who show interest in, your target locations.
We do not recommend doing this even though they put (recommended) next to it. This means people in Colorado who search for roofing in chicago will be able to see your ads. In our experience, there are few people that are out of state that are actually going to be valid leads.
You should select “People in your targeted locations”
Budget
Bidding
Setting Up Your Ads
- 1. We want our ads to be extremely relevant to the ad group
- 2. We want our ads to catch the audience's attention and make them WANT to click
Example of a powerful Ad:
Headline 1: Include your main keyword you’re targeting
Roofing Contractor Chicago
Headline 2: Include Trust Components, Benefits, or Numbers to encourage clicks
A+ BBB Accredited Company
Display Path: Use your Main Keyword again
/Roofing/Chicago
Description 1: Reiterate benefits of your service and include call to action
40 Years Experience. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed. Get a Free Estimate!
We recommend setting up two ads per ad group and switching out little things in the headlines, this way you can test to see which one performs better over time and eventually use the better performing ones.
Ad Extensions
Adding lots of relevant ad extensions to your ad groups and campaigns is what can make or break a campaign. These will help your quality score because they will encourage click through rate. There’s a few different types of ad extensions we recommend using.
Location Extensions: This is the #1 extension we use to really crush ads for our clients. Basically, you’re hooking your Google My Business page up to your ads account. This allows you to show your location information on your ads, but more than anything, allows you to have an ad in the 3 Pack of Organic Maps that sits above the #1 ranked maps business.
This slot will show your review stars and barely looks like an ad, so it’s an easy win win to earn people’s trust, get tons of calls, and get a great ROI.
Call Extension
Another big one we like to use. Setting up call extensions allows a phone number to show beneath your ads up top as well as allows you to show a tracking number in your Map Pack ad. THis is crucial to understand how your ads are converting.
Callout Extensions:
Callout extensions allow you to again show the benefits of your business - they’re short sentences that highlight advantages. We use calls outs like “Best Industry Warrant”, “Family Owned & Operated”, 0% Financing, etc. to catch people's attention and resonate with them.
Sitelink Extensions:
The last extension we commonly use are sitelink extensions. These take up the most real estate in ads and can cause your ad to appear much larger than your competitors which is a significant advantage.
Conversions & Call Tracking
There are 3 types of conversions we setup:
Type 1
Contact Form Submissions (place conversion code on thank you page after people submit)
Type 2
Calls from Landing Page (People click on ad and then call the number on your landing page. You can use with Google’s call tracking numbers or set them up yourself)
Type 3
Ad Extension Calls (These are for the phone number that appears in your ads if people call directly rather than clicking on your ad to go to your landing page)
If you’re not tracking all 3 of these, you need to set this up right now!
Landing Pages
- Main Keyword in Top Headline
- No Menu - just options to either Call or Submit Contact form, remember we don’t want people browsing around. We want to collect their information!
- Advantages of your service below the headline
- Relevant Image
- Contact form should be as short as possible - Yes we know you want their address and more, but it’s less likely they’ll fill out all that information. We recommend just request Name, Address, and Phone
- Make sure they are Mobile-Friendly
- Include areas you service below
- Include Reviews & Testimonials for Proof
- Include Trust Symbols up top like BBB rating, 5 Star Review icons
Monitoring
Once everything is setup, it’s time to let the ads go to work. But that doesn’t mean you just let them run and don’t ever make changes. The first few months in particular, you need to be in your ads account and looking at the data, seeing which ad groups and keywords are converting and which aren’t.
See which ads are working and which aren’t. It is a nonstop cycle of tweaking until you can get our conversion cost as low as possible. From there you can scale upwards.
Once you’re able to scale, you can keep putting another $1 in the Ads machine, and spit out $5 on the backend.
That’s the power of Pay Per Click advertising.
We have clients that spend upwards of $20,000.00 on ads monthly and others who spend only $1,000.00 per month. Guess who’s making a better return?
You guessed it. The $20,000 contractor.
ou can start small, but always learn that to scale in ads you have to spend money to make money!
