How We Generated $180k in Revenue for a Roofing Company with $12k in Ad Spend

Before we talk about what we did, it's worth understanding why most home services ad campaigns produce disappointing results. We've taken over campaigns from other agencies and from business owners running ads themselves, and the same mistakes appear over and over.

The most common mistake is sending ad traffic to a general website homepage. A homepage is designed to introduce your company — it's not designed to capture a lead in crisis mode at 11pm after they noticed a leak. When someone clicks a Google Ad for "emergency roof repair Loveland CO," they need to land on a page that immediately confirms: yes, this is exactly what you need, here's why we're the right call, here's what happens next. A homepage doesn't do that.

The second most common mistake is running broad match keywords without negative keyword lists. Broad match on "roofing" will spend your budget on searches like "roofing nails price" and "roofing memes" before lunch. We've seen campaigns where 60% of spend was going to completely irrelevant searches. The cost-per-lead on these campaigns looks terrible because the denominator is bloated with wasted clicks.

The third mistake — and the one that costs the most money — is slow lead follow-up. The data on this is unambiguous: the probability of qualifying a lead drops by 80% if you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond. Roofing is a high-urgency, high-consideration purchase. Someone who clicks your ad and fills out a form is not comparison shopping for the next two weeks. They need help now. If your follow-up is a phone call 4 hours later, you're handing the job to whoever called them back in 10 minutes.

We structured the Google Ads account around three distinct intent categories, each with its own ad groups, keywords, and landing pages. This is critical — the intent behind "roof replacement cost" is completely different from "emergency roof repair," and they require different messaging and different offers.

Each campaign fed a dedicated landing page — not the homepage, not the general services page. Three campaigns, three landing pages, each speaking directly to the intent behind the search.

The landing pages we built followed a conversion-optimized structure that we've refined across dozens of home services clients. The goal of every element on the page is to move someone from "I'm considering options" to "I'm ready to call."

The key insight is that the page is not trying to close a sale. It's trying to get a phone call or a form submission. Every design decision — button placement, color contrast, text length — was made in service of that single conversion event.

We also ran the page through a 5-second test with new users: if someone can't tell within 5 seconds what you do, who you serve, and what they should do next — the page fails. Our landing pages passed. Most roofing websites don't.

The ads and the landing page generated the leads. The follow-up sequence is what converted them into $181,000 in revenue. This part of the system is almost always underbuilt by contractors who run ads, and it's where most of the money gets left on the table.

We implemented a 3-channel follow-up sequence triggered immediately on form submission:

• Minute 0–2: Automated SMSThe moment a form is submitted, an automated text message fires to the lead's phone number. Not a generic "thanks for submitting" — a personalized message: "Hi [Name], this is [Company] — we just got your inspection request. Someone from our team will call you in the next 10 minutes. If you need immediate help, call us directly: [number]." This sets an expectation and keeps the lead warm while the human is notified.
• Minute 5–10: Live phone callThe lead notification goes to the owner's phone immediately. The goal of this call is not to sell anything — it's to schedule the inspection. Get on the phone, confirm the problem, and book a specific time slot. Scripts matter here: we wrote a 90-second call script focused entirely on confirming availability and locking in a time.
• Hour 1: Email confirmationAfter the call, a confirmation email goes out with the inspection date/time, what to expect, a photo of the technician who will show up, and a link to leave a Google review after the job (planted early, harvested after completion). This email had a 78% open rate.
• Day before inspection: Reminder SMSA reminder text the evening before the inspection with the technician's name, estimated arrival window, and a direct number to reschedule if needed. No-show rate dropped to under 8% with this in place.
• Post-inspection: Same-day estimate deliveryThe written estimate was delivered on-site or by email within 2 hours of the inspection. Every day between inspection and estimate delivery that passes is an opportunity for the homeowner to get competing quotes. We closed 67% of jobs where the estimate was delivered same-day.

Here's the full attribution breakdown for the 90-day campaign:

The 11.3% landing page conversion rate is roughly 3× the industry average for home services (typically 3–5%). That delta alone — the difference between a generic homepage and a purpose-built landing page — accounts for most of the performance gap between this campaign and what most roofing companies experience.

You don't need to be a roofing company to apply this framework. The underlying structure — segmented campaigns by intent, dedicated landing pages, immediate multi-channel follow-up — works for any local service business with a high average job value.

The three things that had the most impact, in order:

• 01Dedicated landing pages matched to ad intent — stop sending paid traffic to your homepage
• 025-minute follow-up — build the notification and response system before you run a single ad
• 03Negative keyword hygiene — audit your search terms report weekly for the first month and add negatives aggressively

If you're running Google Ads and not seeing returns like this, the problem is almost certainly in one of those three areas. Fix the infrastructure before you increase budget.