Contractors · Roofing
The roofer who quotes first usually signs the job.
Roofing demand arrives in bursts and leaves in days. What decides the month is not the size of the budget but how fast a quote gets into a homeowner's hands, and whether replacement was ever separated from repair.
Ten years around the trades before the marketing · Replacement, repair and storm work
After the hail, hour by hour
Day 0
The storm passes
Nobody searches yet. They are looking at the lawn.
Day 1
Search volume triples
And the out-of-town crews are already knocking.
Day 3
Quotes get compared
Whoever put a written price in first is the benchmark.
Day 10
It is over
Demand is back to normal. The work is allocated.
What is different about marketing a roofing company?
Roofing is bought once or twice in a lifetime, costs five figures, and is almost always compared across three written quotes. That makes speed-to-quote the deciding variable, and it means repair enquiries and replacement enquiries have to be advertised, landed and measured as two separate businesses.
Most roofing accounts are built the other way round. One campaign, one landing page, one blended cost per lead, and a homeowner who fills in a form on Tuesday and hears back on Friday. The advertising is rarely the problem in those accounts. The gap between the enquiry and the written price is.
The second structural issue is weather. A roofing business has a demand curve nothing else in the trades has to manage — long flat stretches punctuated by ten-day surges that are worth a quarter of the year's revenue. Those surges reward preparation and punish improvisation, so the work of handling them happens months in advance.
Where it leaks
Five things that cost roofers money
- Bidding the word "roofing" on its own
- It collects repairs, inspections, warranty questions, people looking for a job and students writing essays. The money is in "roof replacement", "shingle replacement" and the storm-damage phrases, and those need separate budgets because they close at wildly different rates.
- Quoting three days after the enquiry
- By then the homeowner has two written prices and a preference. Roofing is one of the few trades where being second costs you the job outright rather than putting you in a comparison.
- No answer for the storm week
- When a hail line moves through, search volume for your service can multiply for about ten days. If bids are not raised and the phones are not staffed, that demand goes to whoever did prepare, including the out-of-province crews who show up with door-knockers.
- Treating the insurance path like the retail path
- A homeowner filing a claim wants to know whether you handle adjusters and supplements. A homeowner paying cash wants to know the price and the warranty. The same landing page cannot answer both well.
- No financing on the page
- On an eight-to-twenty-thousand-dollar ticket, a monthly figure changes who calls. Leaving it off filters out buyers who would have proceeded and leaves you fighting on price with the ones who remain.
How it works
Separate, speed up, then prepare
Separate replacement from repair
Week 1Two campaigns, two landing pages, two cost-per-job targets. A repair enquiry is worth a fraction of a replacement, and mixing them is why most roofing accounts cannot tell whether advertising is working.
Get the quote out the same day
Weeks 2–3Satellite measurement, a template that produces a written price without a second visit, and an acknowledgement text within minutes of the form landing. This step wins more work than any bid change.
Build the storm playbook before the storm
Week 4Pre-written ad copy, a bid multiplier, an overflow answering arrangement and a claim-support page that is already indexed. Written once, triggered in an afternoon, because you will not have time to build it during the event.
Own the map pack in the suburbs you want
OngoingRoofing buyers filter by proximity hard. Photos of completed roofs by neighbourhood, reviews that name the subdivision, and service areas set to where your crews actually travel.
Fit
Where we help and where we do not
This is a good fit if
- You do residential replacement work and want more of it, not just more phone calls.
- Someone can produce a written price within a day of the enquiry arriving.
- You know roughly what a signed roof is worth to you and what share of quotes you win.
- You are prepared to raise bids and staff the phones during a storm week.
This isn't the right fit if
- You want repair volume at the lowest possible cost per call. That is a different account with different economics, and there are cheaper ways to buy it.
- Quotes take a week. Nothing we can buy will outrun that.
- You work wherever the work is, with no defined service area. Geographic targeting is most of what makes roofing advertising efficient.
Other trades
The economics change by trade
A plumbing account and a roofing account should look nothing alike. Here is what changes.
HVAC
Two businesses in one: emergency no-heat calls, and planned replacements sold months before the season turns.
Plumbing
The highest search volume in the trades and the widest ticket range, which is exactly why one campaign cannot cover it.
Electrical
Three revenue streams sharing one van, and only the middle one — panels, service changes and EV — responds to advertising.
Handyman
Small tickets and short drives, where filtering the work and getting called back decides more than lead volume ever does.
What it takes
The parts of the system
Google & Meta Ads
Search, Local Services and paid social, judged on one number: what it costs to put a booked job on the calendar.
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
The map pack is where most local service work is actually won. Category, services, photos, reviews and a profile that stays current.
Lead response & follow-up
Enquiries answered in minutes at any hour, quotes chased for a month, reviews requested automatically. Email sequences included.
Analytics & attribution
Call tracking, conversion import and one dashboard that answers what a booked job costs — the number almost nobody can produce.
Questions roofers ask
What does a roofing lead cost in Ontario?
It varies more by phrase than by market. Repair and inspection enquiries are cheap and plentiful; full replacement enquiries cost several times more and are worth many times that. Anyone quoting you a single cost-per-lead figure for roofing is averaging two different businesses together.
Are Local Services Ads worth it for a roofer?
Usually yes, and they should be running before search ads. They sit above the paid results, charge per lead rather than per click, and carry the Google Guaranteed badge, which matters to a homeowner who has just been door-knocked by three strangers. The tradeoff is less control over the phrases that trigger them.
How do we compete with storm chasers?
On permanence, not on price. A local address, a review history going back years, named crews, and a warranty a homeowner can still claim on in five years. Those are the things an out-of-town crew cannot show, so they belong in the ad copy and on the landing page rather than buried on an about page.
Should we advertise year-round or seasonally?
Year-round at a lower level, then heavily in the shoulder seasons. Going dark in winter surrenders the planning conversations that become spring bookings, and restarting a paused account means re-earning the performance history rather than resuming it.
Do reviews matter as much for roofing as for other trades?
More, because the purchase is infrequent and expensive and the homeowner has no way to judge quality themselves. Recency does most of the work. A review from last month telling a specific story about a specific street is worth more than ten generic ones from two years ago.
We get lots of repair calls we do not want. Can that be fixed?
Yes, and it is usually the fastest improvement available. Negative keywords for repair, patch, leak and warranty language, plus an offer and a page that speak to replacement. Expect fewer total enquiries and a higher share of them worth quoting.
Related: the contractors hub ·the Google Ads landing page checklist
How fast does a roofing enquiry get a price right now?
The free audit times it. It also checks whether repair and replacement are separated, whether your map listing covers the suburbs you want, and what a signed roof is currently costing you in advertising.
You talk to Mathew.Not an account manager, and not a sales team.