Getting a brand-new roofing account profitable in the first 10 weeks

A roofing contractor hired me for Google Ads management to build their account from scratch, no history, no data, just a service area and a budget. In roofing, phone calls are where the sales happen, so CallRail went in from day one to track every call back to the ad that caused it.

First 10 weeks

For a brand-new account in a competitive local service like roofing, $11 per click is low, and $174 per lead is efficient. That didn't happen by accident.

What made that possible

• Went hyper-local instead of city-wide. Targeted a specific handful of local zip codes instead of the whole metro area, so the budget only reached people actually in the service area.
• Blocked junk before it cost a cent. Close to a hundred negative keywords filtered out distributors, retailers, and unlicensed-work searches, plus a separate list blocking named local competitors.
• Split the traffic into 4 focused ad groups, each matched to a different search intent (general roofing contractor searches, full reroof jobs, shingle repair, and fast-turnaround "book this week" searches), so the ad copy always matched what the person was actually looking for.
• Ran a real landing page test. Sent some traffic to an instant online estimate tool, and some to a simpler page with just a form and a phone number. The simple page won, converting at a 50% better rate for close to half the cost per lead ($42 vs. $71). Budget shifted toward it based on that result, not a guess.

The lesson for a new account: don't spend the first month guessing. Track calls from day one, and let the first few weeks of real data tell you where to put the budget.