When referrals slow down, keep asking for them and add one more source of jobs, judged by what each signed job costs you. The cheapest place to start is the Google Business Profile you already have. Every roofer I’ve measured whose profile shows an address has ranked near its own shop, though for two of them that meant barely two miles. If you’d rather pay for calls now, Google’s Local Services Ads charge per lead, and the smallest budget Google offered a DFW roofing client in September 2026 was $327 a week, about $1,400 a month.
The best numbers I’ve found on what each source brings come from the owner of a roughly $11 million roofing company. On October 1, 2026 he posted his monthly spend and jobs by source on r/RoofingSales, pulled from his CRM. Referrals and repeat customers came out on top, at 15 to 18 of about 60 jobs a month. Of the sources he put a price on, Local Services Ads cost him the least per signed job. He told readers to take his attribution lightly, so read it as one company’s books.
Owners report slow months whether they live on referrals or spend heavily on marketing
An owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in June 2026 that “my company is almost exclusively referral based and even that has dried up this month.” In Denton, an owner who relies on referrals and some door knocking after hail wrote in 2025 that he’s “getting real tired of chasing storms every season.” Heavy spending hasn’t spared everyone either: in June 2025 the owner of a decades-old Midwest company wrote that his phone had stopped ringing with his marketing spend at an all-time high.
An $11 million roofer gets more jobs from referrals than from any ad
What each source brought him in a month, with my math on the cost of each signed job:
| Source | Spend a month | Jobs a month | Cost per signed job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referrals and repeat customers | none given | 15 to 18 | none given |
| Website and organic search | none given | 10 to 12, plus most of his commercial work | none given |
| Local Services Ads | about $14,000 | 11 or so | roughly $1,300 |
| Facebook ads (Meta) | about $15,000 | 8 to 10 | $1,500 to $1,900 |
| Door knocking | about $15,000 | 5 to 7 | $2,100 to $3,000 |
| Billboards | $6,000 to $7,000 | maybe 2 | $3,000 to $3,500 |
He closes 35% or more of his Local Services Ads leads and about 25% of his Facebook form leads. About $50,000 a month goes into the paid sources, and he pays his agency $3,000 a month on top of that.
In Roofing Contractor’s 2026 homeowner survey, run with Owens Corning, 74% said they find a roofer through a recommendation from someone they know, and exactly half said they use a search engine. Its respondents averaged 58 years old and it gives no sample size, so treat the figures as a direction.
On Google Maps, most roofers I’ve measured rank best near their own shop
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and says “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” To see where a roofer shows up, I run the same search from 169 points in a 13 by 13 square around the shop and record the rank at each point.
A Fort Worth roofer came second of 87 companies and made the top three at 143 of those points. A Dallas roofer made the top three at 34 points for “roof repair dallas”, holding Oak Cliff and the southwest side before dropping away north of I-30. Two others ranked first at their own address and fell outside the top 20 at 161 and 165 of the 169 points, so their patch ended within about two miles.
Three roofers whose profiles hide the street address barely ranked anywhere. Two were outside the top 20 at every point on two searches, and the third showed up at one point out of 507. I can’t say the hidden address caused it, and for one of them my best guess is a thin five-page website.
Within the patch where you do rank, Google’s tips are to verify the business, keep its details complete and accurate, reply to reviews and add photos. About 62% of homeowners in the survey called online reviews very or extremely important, and your replies sit right under them. In September 2026 I went through 1,061 DFW roofing profiles rated 4.8 or higher with at least 30 reviews. Of the 298 owners with a one- or two-star review, 35 had answered it with contempt, about one in eight. Why Your Roofing Company Disappears on Google Maps Outside Your Hometown covers the towns past your patch.
Google set a DFW roofing client’s Local Services Ads floor at about $1,400 a month
When we set up Local Services Ads (LSA) for a DFW roofing client on September 26, 2026, the lowest weekly budget Google offered for its north DFW ZIP codes was $327. A lower figure brought the warning that it “will likely result in no leads,” and at $327 a week the monthly maximum comes to $1,421. Google projected three leads a week at that budget, about $109 a lead. As of October 2 no lead had been billed, so the $109 is Google’s projection and nothing more.
Google recommends a budget for at least 10 leads a week, more than three times what it projected at the floor. The $11 million owner calls LSA the best thing he runs, though he maxes out the budget most weeks and says his area has no more volume to buy.
Answer every LSA call, because Google warns that “Missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness,” one of the factors in where your ad shows. It also says higher-quality profiles, including those with images, “may rank higher and may also pay lower costs per lead.”
LSA is moving into Google Ads, with US roofers in the first wave from August 2026 and accounts outside the US following in 2027, and the Google Guaranteed badge now reads Google Verified. Check your own account before trusting anyone’s LSA numbers, mine included.
A website can bring as many jobs as LSA, and it takes months to build
The $11 million owner’s website brings about as many jobs as his LSA. The closest result we have comes from a Dallas builder and remodeler we work with. His site carries about 130 long cost guides, and his Google clicks went from about 40 a month in late 2025 to 833 in August 2026. His website form now brings serious custom-home inquiries, one of them from a family of six with a target budget of about $625,000.
About 87% of those August clicks came from people around the country reading cost guides. He gets 2 to 3 qualified leads a month, and since he builds houses, none of this proves anything about roofing.
Paid calls can close at half the rate of word of mouth
An owner who went from word of mouth only to about $8,000 a month of radio and local print got far more calls. “The down side is I used to close 50% of my calls and now I range from 20-25%,” he wrote on r/Roofing in 2023. Plan on more inspections per signed job from any new source than your referrals needed.
That fits how homeowners say they shop: in the Roofing Contractor survey, 66% gather three quotes, and 46% choose between two roofers on proven experience and certifications. Most say prices on a roofer’s website make them more likely to call, though fewer than a year earlier: 65%, down from 78%.
Paid spending can bring nothing back at all: an owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in 2024 that $50,000 of SEO, social media, AdWords and a professionally made commercial didn’t bring a single deal. All his deals come from door knocking and networking.
Bought leads have their own problems, which Angi and HomeAdvisor Leads for Roofers: What They Cost and Why Owners Quit covers. Some of the competition on the map sells leads too: the same sweep of 1,061 profiles turned up 50 that exist to collect calls and sell them on.
An owner who asks every customer at least three times gets about 10% of his work from referrals
About 62% of homeowners in the survey said they’d contact a roofer they had used before, so your old job list is the first place to look. One owner on r/RoofingSales gets about 10% of his business by offering every customer about $500 in advertising credit for a referral and asking at least three times. Another gives a $200 gift card to anyone whose referral hires him.
Keep any reward apart from reviews: Google bans incentives for reviews outright, and in the US the FTC’s 2024 rule bans incentives tied to a review saying something positive or negative. In Texas, a 2019 law makes it an offense for a roofer to cover a homeowner’s insurance deductible, including through a “rebate or credit in connection with the sale” that offsets it. I couldn’t find out whether a referral reward to a past insurance customer counts, so if you do insurance work, ask a construction lawyer in your state before you pay one.
For a DFW roofing client we tried realtors as a referral source, emailing hail reports to 342 listing agents and sending 84 follow-ups. By September 23 twelve had replied (3.5%) and one had asked for an inspection, which found no damage, so no job came of it. Five of the twelve said the house had already sold or the roof was taken care of, so for them the email came after the decision. The first 98 emails went out before the client’s email signing (DKIM) was set up right and mostly landed in spam, which puts the fair count nearer 240 sends. Roofing Referral Programs: Past Customers, Realtors and Insurance Agents goes further.
Track each source by the signed jobs it brings in
An owner ten years in business wrote on r/Roofing in 2024 that he asks everyone who calls where they found him, and hears either Google or a referral. Ask every caller the same thing and write the answer next to the job when it signs. Each month, divide what each source cost by the jobs it signed, because without that record you can’t weigh an LSA job at about $1,300 against a door-knock job at $2,100 or more. Before you put money into a new source, decide how many signed jobs it has to bring and the date you’ll drop it if it doesn’t.
If you want to see where your own profile ranks today, Zentora’s free Google Maps heatmap lets you pick your Google profile and a search, and in a few minutes shows your rank at 49 points around your office.