How much does a roofing marketing agency cost?
Most roofing marketing agencies charge $1,500-$5,000/mo or a percentage of ad spend (typically 10-20%), often with setup fees and 12-month contracts. We charge $795 a month for Google Ads management on ad budgets from $2,500, or $995 a month with Local Services Ads added. A $750 one-time setup that includes a landing page for each campaign, then month to month with no contract.
What is the average roofing cost per lead on Google?
Most roofing companies pay $55-$105 per lead on Google LSA under normal conditions. Small metros run $40-$65, and post-storm surges reach $130-$165+. Google Ads CPL runs $100-$175 for emergency repair and $200-$350 for residential replacement, with LocaliQ benchmarking roofing and gutters around $228.
Should roofers use Google Ads or LSA?
Both, with the split shifting by season. LSA delivers exclusive pay-per-lead calls with the Google Verified badge. Google Ads reaches storm damage, insurance claim, and replacement intent that LSA cannot target. A common baseline is 60% LSA / 40% Google Ads, flipped during active storm season.
Why hire a roofing specialist agency instead of a generalist?
Roofing has dynamics generalists miss: storm chasers inflating CPCs 50-100% within 48 hours of a hail event, insurance claim leads with completely different economics than cash-pay leads, a close-rate spread running from 60-80% on emergency repair down to 8-12% on commercial, and factory-authorized brand campaigns (GAF Master Elite, Owens Corning Platinum Preferred) that carry lower CPC and 30-50% higher close rates. Each needs its own campaign, and a generalist runs them all as one.
What is a storm campaign pre-build?
The full campaign (keywords, ads, landing pages, geo lists) built in advance and kept paused, then activated within 4-12 hours of a confirmed hail or wind event, before storm chasers inflate CPCs 50-100%. The first 48-72 hours after a storm produce the highest-quality leads of the year.
How do you handle insurance claim leads differently from cash-pay leads?
Separate campaigns, because the economics differ. Insurance work runs $10,000-$18,000+ with the carrier paying, so speed-to-bid and claim guidance matter more than CPL. Cash replacement runs $8,500-$15,000 with a homeowner comparing quotes for weeks, which needs financing messaging and longer remarketing windows.
How long until roofing marketing pays off?
LSA and emergency repair campaigns typically produce leads in the first week. Replacement and storm campaigns take 4-6 weeks for Smart Bidding to optimize. Launching 4-6 weeks pre-season pays 22-35% less per lead all season than launching mid-season.
Do you handle roofing LSA lead rating and disputes?
Yes, every lead. Google auto-credits the obvious invalid leads, but plenty slip through. We rate every roofing lead, mark booked jobs so the account optimizes for revenue, and dispute what Google's system missed inside its 30-day window.
What if Google suspends my roofing LSA profile?
We do not bill you that month, and we handle the reinstatement process at no additional cost. Most agencies still charge their fee while the profile is offline.
Do I need to be Google Verified to start?
Yes, every Local Services Ads advertiser has to pass Google's verification, which used to be called Google Guaranteed. For a roofing company that means the state licence where one is required, proof of general liability insurance and the background check, and we run the application with you rather than leaving you to it. Management begins the day approval lands, and we build the Google Ads side while the LSA checks are in progress so nothing waits.
What roofing marketing budget should I start with?
Small roofing companies typically start at $1,500-$2,500/mo in ad spend, mid-size companies at $3,000-$5,000, competitive metros at $5,000-$10,000+. During storm season, raise the baseline 50-100% for the 2-4 week active window.
Can you run factory-authorized brand campaigns?
Yes. GAF Master Elite, Owens Corning Platinum Preferred, CertainTeed SELECT ShingleMaster, IKO Shield Pro Plus, and Malarkey Emerald Pro credentials unlock brand campaigns with lower CPC and 30-50% higher close rates, displayed on a dedicated landing page we build free.
Will you manage my roofing reviews?
Yes: scripted post-job request templates for your crews, monitoring, and responses written on your behalf. Review velocity matters for LSA ranking, and a year-round cadence avoids the storm-season-only clustering that reads as storm-chaser behavior.
Are you Google Ads certified?
Yes, active Google Ads Search certifications through Google Skillshop. We mention it because buyers ask, but the differentiator is the storm pre-build, the insurance vs cash separation, the brand-authorized strategy, the offline conversion stack, and the 90-Day Booked-Job Guarantee.
How do I know if my roofing marketing agency is actually making me money?
Ask for what it costs to sign a roof from their channel, not what it costs to get a lead, and then four more numbers: what share of their leads signed, the revenue those roofs produced with insurance and retail separated, how many calls were outside your area or wanted a repair you do not do, and what they changed in the account last month. Hesitation on any of them is the answer. A report of impressions, clicks and a "leads" total with no signed-roof line is a description of activity, and an agency that cannot connect spend to a signed contract is not measuring what you hired it for.
Why do my ads produce calls that never become signed contracts?
In most roofing accounts it is because the wrong thing is being counted as a win. Google Ads by default treats any call over 60 seconds as a conversion, so its bidding learns to produce phone rings and cannot distinguish a signed insurance replacement from a homeowner collecting a fourth estimate. The fix is marking signed roofs in call tracking and importing them into Google Ads against the click that produced them, so bidding follows revenue. The other cause is structure: an $800 leak repair and a $14,000 insurance replacement in one campaign means the algorithm optimises for a roofing customer who does not exist.
Should I fire my roofing marketing agency?
Not on a slow month between storms, and not without one number in hand: cost per signed roof for the last 90 days, split by campaign so repairs, retail replacements and insurance work show separately. An agency doing the work has it or can build it in two weeks. One that talks about the weather, the off season, or sends more impression charts has told you what you needed. And before switching, confirm you own the Google Ads account, the LSA profile, the call tracking and the conversion history, because a roofing account's storm campaign and its learning data are both inside that account.
How do I stop paying for roofers seeking work and DIY shingle searches?
Roofing keywords pull in a lot of people who will never buy a roof: "roofing jobs hiring", "roofer salary", "how to shingle a roof", "roofing nails bulk". They click and they cost. The negative list goes in before the first dollar spends, covering careers, schools, licensing, DIY, parts and the big-box retailers, and we read the real search terms every week for the first 60 days because storm season produces phrasing nobody planned for. On Local Services Ads the same discipline is tight job types, a service area cut to where a crew can actually get to, and every lead rated so Google learns what fits and credits what does not.
Are Angi and HomeAdvisor worth it for roofing contractors?
After hail you are not only competing with the other roofers who bought the same lead, you are competing with out-of-state crews working the same street, and a shared platform sells one homeowner several times over in exactly the window where speed decides the job. In April 2023 the FTC finalized an order requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million, alleging it sold leads that did not match the services providers offered or the areas they asked to work in, and claimed job-conversion rates it could not substantiate. The order bars it from making claims about how often leads become jobs. If shared leads are part of your roofing mix, treat them as a bridge: answer inside a minute, track close rate by source, cap the spend, and have your exclusive storm campaign built and paused before the next event rather than assembled during it.
Why does a smaller roofer outrank me on the map after a storm?
Because the map pack is not an auction, and after a storm that matters more than ever. Map ranking and paid ranking are separate systems and spend does not cross between them. The map weighs proximity to the searcher, category and service configuration, review volume and recency, profile completeness, and engagement. A smaller roofer with three hundred recent reviews and a complete profile beats a larger one with forty reviews and a bigger budget. The fix is a review request after every roof and a properly configured profile, which lifts your LSA ranking and your landing page conversion rate at the same time.
We are getting calls and not signing roofs. Is that an advertising problem?
Often it is not, and an agency that never says so is selling you something. ServiceTitan measured a 42% average call booking rate across the trades it studied, and shops with fewer than 5 technicians averaged just 24% (roofing was not broken out separately in that dataset) (ServiceTitan's analysis of more than 3,000 trade businesses across the US and Canada, June 2022). Call-tracking benchmarks put missed calls at roughly 20-30% of inbound volume for home service businesses, rising to 40-50% during seasonal peaks, and a hail week is the definition of a peak. So before adding budget, pull last month's recordings and count the calls that rang out, the calls answered without asking for the inspection, and the calls quoted a price over the phone instead of booked. On a storm week those three decide the season more than any bid does.