Roofing is one of the more expensive trades to advertise in, and one of the easiest to waste money in. The searches range from someone with water in the ceiling to an apprentice looking for work, and a single campaign covering everything will happily spend on both. This guide sets out a structure that holds up: campaigns split by job type, bidding that responds to weather, negatives that do real work, landing pages built for one job each, and tracking that reports on booked inspections rather than clicks.
Split campaigns by job type, not by keyword volume
Four campaigns cover most roofing businesses.
Emergency and leak repair. Highest urgency, shortest decision, phone-led. Runs extended hours, uses call assets heavily, and should never share a budget with slower-converting work.
Roof restoration. Considered, comparison-driven, form and call mix. Buyers want to understand what restoration includes and whether it is the right choice against replacement.
Re-roofing and replacement. Longest cycle and highest value. Expect multiple quotes and delayed decisions. This campaign justifies a higher cost per enquiry than the others.
Gutters, downpipes and ancillary work. Lower value but often a doorway to larger jobs, and cheap to compete for while the bigger terms are contested.
Separate campaigns matter because they let you control budget, schedule and bidding independently. Bundled together, the highest-volume terms consume the budget and the highest-value ones never get served.
Bidding around storms
Roofing demand spikes with weather, and the spike is short. The account needs to be able to respond within hours, not at the next monthly review.
In practice that means three things. First, headroom: daily budgets on the repair campaign should be able to lift substantially without a new approval every time. Second, geography: the ability to layer bid adjustments or a dedicated campaign onto affected postcodes rather than lifting spend statewide. Third, capacity honesty: if you cannot answer the phone or book inspections at the rate the ads produce, lifting budget converts demand into bad reviews.
Between events, keep the repair campaign running at a base level. An account with recent conversion history responds far better when you push it than one switched on cold.
Match types and keyword discipline
Use exact and phrase match for the terms you know convert, and treat broad match as a research tool that is only safe with a mature negative list and close supervision. Roofing attracts an unusually wide range of adjacent searches — materials, DIY, careers, insurance advice, real estate — and broad match will find every one of them.
Group tightly. "Roof leak repair" and "roof replacement quote" do not belong in the same ad group, because the ad copy and landing page that suit one actively repel the other.
Negative keywords that matter
A roofing negative list should be built before launch and pruned weekly for the first two months. The recurring categories:
- DIY and materials — how to, kit, sealant, membrane, sheets, price per metre, Bunnings-style retail searches.
- Careers — jobs, apprenticeship, hiring, wages, courses, licence.
- Wholesale and supply — suppliers, manufacturers, tiles for sale, secondhand.
- Insurance advice — claim entitlement questions, ombudsman, assessor complaints, where the searcher wants advice rather than a roofer.
- Wrong trade — ceiling repair, plastering, solar-only enquiries, tarpaulin hire, guttering retail.
- Free and cheap — free roof, cheapest roofer, government grant queries, if those enquiries do not convert for you.
The search terms report is the source of truth. If nobody has read it this month, the account is not being managed.
Landing pages: one job each
Sending every campaign to the homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake. Each campaign needs a page that answers the exact question the searcher typed.
A repair page should load fast on mobile, put a tap-to-call button in the first screen, state your service area and hours plainly, show your licence details, and include a short form for people who will not call. Nothing else. A restoration page needs more: what the process includes, how long it takes, what it will not fix, photographs of comparable work, and an explanation of when replacement is the better decision. A re-roof page needs material comparisons, warranty explanation, an outline of how quoting works and what happens if weather delays the job.
Every page should carry the trust signals a roofing buyer looks for: licence number, insurance, years operating, genuine project photography rather than stock, and reviews displayed without exaggeration.
Ad copy that filters
Good roofing ad copy repels as much as it attracts. If you do not do repairs under a certain value, say what you do instead. If you are not the cheapest, lead on response time, licensing and workmanship rather than price. Include the service area in the copy so people outside it self-select out.
Use call assets on repair campaigns, location assets where relevant, and sitelinks that separate repair, restoration and re-roof so the searcher can route themselves. Callout assets are the right place for licence and insurance details.
Schedules and devices
Repair demand does not respect business hours. Storms arrive overnight and ceilings leak on weekends, and competitors frequently switch off. Running the repair campaign outside business hours is only worth it if someone answers — an unanswered emergency call costs more than the click, because the caller simply rings the next result.
Mobile dominates repair searches and desktop over-indexes on restoration and re-roof research. Check the split rather than assuming, and make sure the mobile experience is the one that gets the attention.
Tracking and what to report
Install call tracking with dynamic number insertion so calls are attributed to the keyword and page that produced them. Record calls where lawfully permitted with proper notification, because listening to a week of calls will teach you more about lead quality than any dashboard.
Define a qualified enquiry with your team before launch — most roofers settle on a booked inspection — and report on cost per booked inspection and cost per signed job by campaign. Clicks, impressions and click-through rate are diagnostics, not results.
The first 90 days
Expect the first month to be about data and negatives, the second to be about structure and landing pages, and the third to be about scaling what converts. If nothing has changed in the account since launch, that is not stability, it is neglect.
For the wider picture, see the roofing marketing and SEO page and our tradie marketing hub. If budget is the current question, read what roofing marketing costs in Australia, and if the weather is turning, roofing storm season marketing covers the preparation that makes these campaigns work.
