A roofing owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in June 2026 that his Google Ads cost per lead had doubled that year, from $280 to $560, counting only leads that became booked appointments in his CRM. LocaliQ, a company that sells advertising, looked at 3,211 US home services search ad campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025 and put the median click for roofing and gutters at $10.70 and the median lead at $228.15, the highest of any home services category in its report.
Owners who post their budgets online report spending about $2,000 to $10,000 a month. Some got nothing for it, while one on r/Roofing wrote in 2023 that a $10,000 budget usually brought his cost per lead down to $200, about 50 leads a month. Whether the ads pay you comes down to one sum: what a booked inspection costs you, divided by the share of inspections you sign, has to come in under what you clear on a job.
We don’t run Google Search ads for roofers. We manage Google’s Local Services Ads, which bill per lead, and the floor Google set for a DFW roofing client of ours in September 2026 came to about $1,400 a month.
Roofing’s search ad leads cost $228 at LocaliQ’s median, the most of any home service
For roofing and gutters, LocaliQ found that 5.66% of people who saw an ad clicked it and 3.70% of clicks became a lead. Each figure is a median taken on its own, so they don’t multiply out: $10.70 a click at 3.70% would put a lead at $289. A lead in LocaliQ’s figures is a conversion the campaign tracked, which is a step short of an inspection on your calendar.
A roofer on r/RoofingSales asked in April 2025 whether anyone else was paying $20 to $30 a click, about two to three times LocaliQ’s median. Bid ranges for your own area are in Keyword Planner inside Google Ads, and its two top-of-page columns are easy to misread. The low one is roughly the 20th percentile of what advertisers paid for a top-of-page bid in your chosen area over the last 30 days, Google says, and the high one roughly the 80th, so about four in five paid less than the high figure. Neither tells you what a typical click costs.
More bidders push click prices up, and a federal court found Google did too
Google says you pay the least it takes to clear its Ad Rank thresholds and beat the advertiser ranked just below you, or a minimum it calls the reserve price when nobody is below you. So every roofer who starts bidding on your town’s searches gives everyone above him a higher number to beat.
In August 2024 a federal judge in Washington, D.C. found in United States v. Google that Google’s monopoly power “has enabled Google to increase text ads prices without any meaningful competitive constraint.” The opinion says Google used “pricing knobs” to raise prices “often between 5% and 15% at a time,” and that “Many advertisers do not even realize that Google is responsible for the changes in price.” Separately, the plaintiffs’ expert witness told the court that text-ad click prices doubled between 2013 and 2021.
Google contests these district court findings, which cover search ads from every kind of advertiser and say nothing about roofing. If your cost per lead climbs while nothing in your account has changed, Google’s pricing is one possible cause, alongside more roofers bidding.
A $50 daily budget can bill $100 in a day and $1,520 in a month
For most campaigns Google treats the daily budget as an average. It can spend up to twice that on a busy day and caps the month at 30.4 times the daily figure, so $50 a day can bill $100 on one day and no more than $1,520 for the month. Work back from the month you can carry: $1,000 a month is about $33 a day. At LocaliQ’s median cost per lead, $1,520 buys six or seven tracked leads and $1,000 buys about four.
Two owners spending about $2,000 a month in 2023 got opposite results. One on r/RoofingSales said those leads, with referrals, kept his company busy. The other, in a small Delaware county, paid $18 to $125 a click for nothing, and three companies he tried at $240 to $1,400 a month got him nothing either. A new owner on r/smallbusiness got no calls at all on about $3,000 a month in 2024, and said later that the ads were a Smart campaign.
Google only knows which leads booked an inspection if you tell it
Google counts a tracked call from your website as a conversion once it lasts longer than a minimum length you set. A job seeker who stays on the line that long counts the same as a homeowner with hail damage, so check what minimum your account uses. The $560 owner counts something narrower: “true leads with booked appointments in our CRM, not clicks or what google ‘thinks’ a lead is.”
Google built offline conversion imports for ads that lead to a sale at the office or over the phone. You send back which clicks and calls became booked inspections or signed jobs, and then measure the campaign by what happened after the click.
Your close rate on ad leads decides whether the ads pay
“Our inspection to contract closing rate is around 8% and it seems awful,” an owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in May 2026 about his Google Ads leads. At 8% it takes 12 or 13 inspections to sign one roof. A Pennsylvania roofing and siding owner expects about half: in July 2026 he wrote that two to four more qualified appointments a week would mean one or two more jobs, though a few thousand dollars of search ads hadn’t become consistently profitable. An estimator on r/Roofing wrote in 2023 that referral and word-of-mouth customers close far better than ones who saw an ad. I found no published close rates by lead source for roofing, so treat these as single companies’ numbers.
Put the 8% beside the $560 owner’s appointment costs and each signed roof carries $3,500 in ad spend at $280 an appointment and $7,000 at $560. Those are two owners’ numbers run together, so swap in your own and hold the result against what a signed roof clears after materials and labor. If the ad cost eats most of that, those jobs keep the crews busy without paying you much. How to Track Which Marketing Brings In Your Roofing Jobs shows how to tie each job to where it came from.
Two of Google’s default settings widen who sees your ad
Search partners. New Search campaigns include Google’s search partners unless you untick “Include Google search partners” in the campaign settings. A roofing advertiser on r/PPC wrote in March 2024 that his leads were people looking for jobs and free roofs, neither of which his company offers. He turned off search partners and display ads, and never said whether that fixed it.
Location. Google’s default location option, “Presence or interest,” reaches people in or regularly in your area plus people who’ve shown interest in it, and “Presence” drops that last group. Google doesn’t say the default brings in out-of-area leads, and I can’t prove it does, but if you’re paying for calls from three counties over, check this setting first.
Google says it won’t charge for clicks meant to run up your bill
An owner whose company did $2.7 million in 2024 wrote on r/RoofingSales in January 2025 that he doesn’t run Google Ads. He blames dozens of spam calls from people looking for jobs, and he suspects other roofers of clicking his ads.
Google calls a click invalid when it shows no genuine interest, such as a bot or someone clicking to run up your costs. It says you aren’t charged for those, and when it catches them after billing it credits your next invoice. Google decides which clicks are invalid, and I’ve seen nothing that shows whether rival roofers click each other’s ads. If junk calls are your main complaint, Why Your Roofing Leads Are Junk, and What to Check First goes through what to look at.
Local Services Ads charge per lead, and a DFW roofer’s floor was about $1,400 a month
Search ads charge for a click whether or not the person ever calls. Local Services Ads charge for a valid lead, meaning a call or a message. We sell LSA management, so weigh this comparison knowing which side we’re on.
When we set up LSA for a DFW roofing client on September 26, 2026, Google’s floor for that client’s ZIP codes was $327 a week, and any lower figure brought a warning that it “will likely result in no leads.” At the floor the setup showed a $1,421 monthly maximum, and Google projected three leads a week, about $109 a lead. That’s Google’s projection, made before any lead had been billed.
In those ZIP codes that comes to about $1,400 a month before you’ve signed a job, and the floor where you work may sit higher or lower. A search budget can start below that, since you choose the daily figure.
The lead costs in this guide measure different things. LocaliQ’s $228 is a conversion the campaign tracked, the $109 is Google’s projection for an LSA lead, and the $560 is a booked appointment. Compare them only after you’ve turned each into a cost per signed job. Google Local Services Ads for Roofers: Budget, Cost per Lead and Disputes covers LSA in full.
Decide what a signed job can cost in ads, then check four settings
A roofing contractor on r/Entrepreneur wrote in 2023: “Leaning toward ads just because I’m gonna need work in a couple weeks not a couple months.” If that’s you, start from your average profit on a job and work out the most you’ll spend on ads to sign one. Then check four things in the account:
- Search partners. Untick them unless they bring booked inspections.
- Location. Check whether “Presence or interest” is reaching people you can serve.
- Call length. Set a minimum long enough that a wrong number doesn’t count as a lead.
- Offline conversions. Send booked inspections and signed jobs back to Google, so you judge the campaign on work you can sign.
After a month, divide everything you spent, including any fee to whoever runs the account, by the roofs you signed, and set that beside what your other sources cost per signed job. If someone else runs the ads, ask them for cost per booked inspection, since Google’s conversion count takes in any call that passes your minimum length.
Before you pay for clicks across town, it helps to know where you already show up for free: pick your Google profile and a search in the free Google Maps heatmap, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.