Is Google Ads Worth It for Small Roofing Businesses?

When small roofing businesses are looking for a new way to expand the reach of their marketing channels, the question of whether Google Ads is worth the investment often comes up. With the right strategies, Google Ads can deliver a consistent stream of leads and strong returns. But like any tool in your business, its success depends on how you implement the system into your marketing strategy. We hope that you can use this practical guide to learn about the benefits, challenges, and actions you can take to maximize ROI (return on investment) for roofing businesses investing in Google Ads.

The Benefits of Google Ads for Small Roofing Businesses

Gain Visibility Quickly: Unlike SEO, which usually takes a few months to increase clicks on your website, Google Ads puts your business in front of your target customers instantly. For roofing businesses who are experiencing a slow period, this immediate visibility can be very important.

Target Those in Your City: Google Ads allows businesses to target individuals who live in specific locations, this ensures that you’re only paying for ads to be shown to potential customers who live in the areas you service. You can try using keywords like “roof replacement near me” or “emergency roof repairs” to attract high-intent leads, they are more likely to convert into paying customers.

Fits Your Budget: As a small business you can choose daily and entire campaign budgets, to ensure your ad spend aligns with your businesses financial capacity. You will be in complete control of how much you spend, and can further adjust campaigns based on how well they are performing.

Data-Driven Decisions: Google Ads provides you with detailed analytics, which allows your business to track clicks, conversions, and cost-per-lead (CPL). This transparency helps when you’re making decisions for your roofing businesses and refine campaigns over time.

High-Intent Leads: When people are searching for roofing services on Google they usually are in need of a service immediately. It is crucial to catch these high-intent leads, it will increase the likelihood of them converting into a paying customer.

Potential Challenges with Google Ads

1. Measuring the right KPI: It can be a struggle sometimes to measure the right metric to get a good Return on Ads Spend. And if you cannot measure a quantity you can never improve it. For roofing leads this is especially troublesome because each lead captured via PPC has to go through different stages and may or may not convert eventually. The business needs to be aware that they are measuring the right metrics and reporting them back to the ads engine properly in order for the ads to have good ROAS. Google Analytics, GTMs and other measurement tools in the marketing are very helpful for this.  

2. High Competition: Keywords related to roofing are often expensive due to high competition, especially in larger cities. If your cost-per-click (CPC) is high, it will quickly run through your budget if it’s not carefully managed. Use features such as target cost per acquisition (target CPA), audience segments and local SEO friendly keywords to decrease your CPC.

3. Learning Curve: If you or your business is new to digital ads, the process of setting up and managing Google Ads can be very overwhelming for one person. If there are any mistakes in your campaign settings or targeting can negatively impact your business when ad spend dollars are wasted. 

4. Click Fraud Risks: As a roofing business, there is a chance you may experience click fraud. This happens when your competitors or online bots click on ads maliciously, which drives up costs without generating any genuine leads for your business. 

5. Limited Organic Value: Unlike SEO, which helps build long-term visibility for your business, Google Ads only gives you  results for as long as you’re paying. Once your budget runs out, the leads stop coming as well.

Strategies to Improve your ROI

Choosing the Right Keywords: Start off your strategy by focusing on high-intent, location-specific keywords like “roof installation (your city)” or “roof repair near me.” Then, start using Google’s Keyword Planner to find terms that balance search volume and reasonable CPC until you find what works best for your business.

Leveraging Ad Extensions: Next, begin utilizing call extensions, location extensions, and sitelink extensions in order to gain more information about your potential clients and increase click-through rates (CTR). As a small roofing business, call extensions are often very efficient  when you’re looking to capture immediate inquiries.

Using Negative Keywords: Be sure to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches by adding negative keywords. For instance, exclude terms like “DIY roof repair” or “roofing jobs” to avoid wasting your budget.

Optimize Your Website: Check to make sure that your landing pages are mobile-friendly, have minimal load times, and have a landing page that is tailored to the ad’s intent. A dedicated page for “emergency roof repair” will convert better leads than a generic homepage with no specific information.

Track and Refine: Use Google Ads’ conversion tracking to monitor which campaigns and keywords are driving the most leads. Regularly review performance metrics and adjust bids, targeting, and ad copy to improve results.

Set a Realistic Budget: Start with a small daily budget and increase it as you identify profitable campaigns. In order to maintain your budget, select a cost-per-lead that aligns with your profit margins.

Consider Professional Management: If managing Google Ads for your business feels daunting, you could try hiring a PPC specialist or agency to take on this task for you. Their expertise can help you avoid costly mistakes in terms of ad spend, and achieve better results faster.

Test Different Ad Formats: Now it’s time to experiment with different ad formats, such as responsive search ads or display ads, to see which resonates best with your target audience. For example, image-based display ads can work well for promoting seasonal offers or discounts.

Geo-Targeting for Seasonal Impact: Roofing needs typically spike in specific areas due to weather events. Make sure to pay attention to these events and adjust your campaigns to focus on regions that have been impacted due to storms or heavy snowfall seasons to capture the demand.

A/B Test your Ads Strategies: Finally, it’s important to A/B test your different strategies for different audience segments. E.g. Ads Keywords built via Google Ads Sense may not work well for certain demographics while Keywords built via scraping your own data or leveraging a tool like SpyFu or SemRush may work much better. The key is to test it via a proper A/B testing framework.

In conclusion, Google Ads is likely a good investment for your roofing business, if you’re ready to put in some work and follow up with your leads. Get started today so that you can watch your business grow tomorrow!