Google Ads · Roofers
Google Ads for roofing companies, from storm days to re-roofs
Roofing is the only trade where the weather forecast is a bidding document. A named storm doubles emergency searches within hours and the effect decays inside a week, so the firms that win are the ones whose campaign already existed on a low budget and could be scaled the same afternoon.
In short
Google Ads for roofers in the UK needs a different build from a generic Google Ads account, and this is how PipelineOS structures it. The account splits by urgency before it splits by anything else. Emergency repair runs its own campaign on a 24/7 schedule with call-only ads on mobile, because a person with water coming through a ceiling is not filling in a form. The first ad group to build is Emergency roof repair: call-only ads on mobile, 24/7 schedule, highest bids in the account. The most common way this goes wrong: advertising emergency roof repair and letting it go to voicemail.
How we build it
The account splits by urgency before it splits by anything else. Emergency repair runs its own campaign on a 24/7 schedule with call-only ads on mobile, because a person with water coming through a ceiling is not filling in a form. Planned work — re-roofs, replacements, new roof cost — runs separately on office hours plus evenings, with sitelinks to completed jobs and guarantees. Flat roofing gets a third campaign because GRP, EPDM and felt buyers search by material and each has a different price expectation. A fourth campaign covers ancillary work: fascias, soffits, guttering, chimney and moss removal, which are cheap jobs that keep a team busy in a quiet fortnight.
Storm rules are written before the storm. Emergency sits on a deliberately modest daily budget most of the year, with a documented escalation: when a named storm or an amber wind warning is issued, the emergency budget goes up three to five times and the bid strategy switches from target CPA to maximise conversions, because target CPA will refuse to bid into a market where everyone else has raised theirs. That change wants to happen the day before the wind, not the Tuesday after, by which point you are paying storm prices for a market that has already booked.
Match types differ by side. Emergency stays on phrase and exact, because urgency terms are cheap to define and expensive to get wrong. Planned work can carry broader coverage with a strong negative list, since the discovery language is wider — people search “how much is a new roof” long before they search “roofers near me”. Geography is presence-only with a tighter radius on emergency than on planned, because you can drive an hour to quote a re-roof and cannot drive an hour to a leak.
Ad groups
The account structure in practice. Ad groups stay tight so the ad can genuinely match the search, which lowers cost per click for the same position.
| Ad group | Example keywords | Bids and handling |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency roof repair | emergency roof repair, roof leak, tiles blown off, roofer out today | Call-only ads on mobile, 24/7 schedule, highest bids in the account. Pause it outright if nobody is answering the phone after 6pm. |
| Re-roof and replacement | new roof cost, re-roof [town], roof replacement quote, slate roof replacement | Two to four weeks of consideration, so retarget and measure on a 60-day conversion window. Ad copy leads on guarantee length and completed work, not urgency. |
| Flat roofing by material | GRP fibreglass roof, EPDM rubber roof, felt roof replacement, flat roof repair [town] | One ad group per material. The buyer has already picked a system and will click the ad that names it. Bids can run high because these convert well. |
| Chimney, lead and guttering | chimney repointing, lead flashing repair, gutter replacement, roof moss removal | Cheap clicks, small jobs, useful for filling gaps. Keep bids low and let this campaign run at a loose CPA — it earns its keep as fill work, not as headline revenue. |
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Call 07443 392243WhatsAppBudget and the arithmetic
Most roofing accounts settle at £700–£2,000 a month, with the emergency share sitting near the bottom of its range most weeks and spiking hard for the few days after a storm. Emergency clicks run £4–£9 and rise sharply during a weather event; planned re-roof clicks run £3–£7. Cost per enquiry typically lands at £20–£50 on emergency and £40–£110 on planned work, the gap being that re-roof buyers gather three quotes and take a month about it.
Run the sum both ways. An emergency repair is worth £300–£900 and closes fast, often better than one in two if you answer the phone, so a £35 enquiry cost is trivial. A re-roof is worth £6,000–£12,000 and closes nearer one in four or five, meaning perhaps £350–£500 of advertising per job won — still an unremarkable share of the contract. The number that ruins roofing accounts is not cost per click but answer rate: at a 50% answer rate on emergency you have doubled your true cost per job without a single setting changing.
Four ways this goes wrong
- Advertising emergency roof repair and letting it go to voicemail. That caller rings the next ad within ninety seconds, and you have paid a storm-week click price for the privilege.
- Discovering the storm from the enquiry volume rather than the forecast. By the time you raise budgets on the Wednesday, the Monday demand has been booked by someone else at half your CPC.
- Broad matching “roof repair” and paying for roof racks, roof boxes, roof bars, caravan roofs and people buying tiles by the pallet.
- Sending re-roof clicks and emergency clicks to the same page. The leak caller needs a phone number above the fold; the re-roof buyer needs cost guidance and twenty photographs, and neither is served by a compromise.
The two pages behind this one
This page is the intersection. For the wider picture:
Google Ads in general
Everything about marketing for roofers
Questions
How much should the emergency campaign hold back for storms?
We normally run emergency at a third of its capable budget in settled weather and keep the headroom in the account rather than in a plan. When a warning is issued, the daily budget goes up three to five times for four or five days and then comes back down. The point is that the campaign, ad copy and landing page already exist, so the only decision on the day is a number.
Do call-only ads work for roofing?
On emergency terms, yes, and they often beat standard ads on cost per enquiry because they remove the landing page from the journey entirely. On planned work they are poor, because a re-roof buyer wants to see your work before speaking to anyone. We run call-only on the emergency campaign for mobile and keep standard ads everywhere else.
Should a roofer bid on competitors' names?
Rarely worth it, with one exception. Bidding on a rival's name gives you an expensive click from someone who already chose somebody else, and their brand ad will outrank yours on quality score. The exception is defending your own name when a national lead-selling site is bidding on it, which happens more in roofing than in most trades and is cheap to counter.
Related
Also worth reading
- Buying roofing leads, and what they really costRunning your own ads against paying a lead seller, with the arithmetic.
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