Managing Roofing Contractor PPC Management
PPC management for roofing contractors refers to creating and optimizing PPC advertising campaigns. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let’s dive a little deeper.
To provide professional paid ads management, a paid advertising company for roofing contractors often starts by getting to know you. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you’d approach paid advertising for a local area roofing company is much different from how you’d handle it for nationwide roofing contractor ecommerce site.
For example, local roofing companies are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. To accomplish this, paid advertising can build traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don’t yet exist or need to be substantially improved.
In contrast, ecommerce-focused roofing companies are most likely to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through PPC advertising that boosts traffic to an optimized product page or category page. In some cases, it might even make sense to include Google Shopping Campaigns in your strategy. We’ve even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.
The next step in roofing contractor paid ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some roofing companies, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.
Your roofing company should use a variety of advertising strategies and marketing tools to be successful with PPC advertising. For example, the best roofing company paid advertising services will include tactics to:
- Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social channels, and third-party websites.
- Increase conversions for your roofing company through qualified leads or online sales.
- Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
- Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
- Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
- Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.
A Few of Our Experts
Types of Paid Ads for Roofing Companies
The options for running PPC advertising for your roofing company are numerous. Let’s discuss some of the most common paid advertising being run for roofing companies.
1.) Local Ads
You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your roofing company. Depending on the nature of your nearby roofing company, you may find better success in one platform versus another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Here are a few options for local advertising.
Google is going to offer two options.
The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. This is a very dynamic ad campaign type which utilizes multiple headlines, images, videos, and service locations to allow the Google algorithm to find the best combination of assets to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.
The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. Plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers often use Google Local Service Ads.
Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. This is a little more straightforward, since it just involves setting up a campaign that has ad sets with geographic restrictions. We often rely on local area Facebook Ads for all types of roofing companies.
2.) Social Ads
Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.
Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social media marketing. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative changes for campaigns with higher spending.
The best part of social ads is you can target audiences that have never thought of your product or service, or perhaps just aren’t thinking about it now. When running search engine ads, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively searching for what your roofing company offers.
That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren’t closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.
3.) Search Engine Advertising
You’ll want to invest in search engine marketing if you know people are looking online for the products you offer.
Some people refer to this as roofing contractor Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. An advertisement that appears on the search results page of a search engine is called a search ad, which are above the organic SEO placements.
If you’ve been running search engine ads on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.
4.) Display Ads
You’ll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.
Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.
With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.
5.) Retargeting Ads
Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your roofing company website, landing page, or sales funnel.
It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they’ve had time to think through different options.
You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.
6.) Shopping Ads
This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.
To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your roofing company.
With these tools in place, you’ll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.
7.) Video Ads
You can run video ads on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other social networking websites.
If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you’ll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.
To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you’ll need a working Facebook Ads account.
Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!
If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid ads campaigns.
Tips for Managing PPC for Roofing Contractors
With in-depth knowledge of the latest paid ads trends for roofing companies and other industries, we are a team of PPC advertising specialists.
Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.
1.) Keyword Research Tips
In the context of paid ads, you’ll find keyword research for roofing contractors mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only show up based on what your roofing company targets on Google or Bing.
A search for “nearby roofing contractor” on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a roofing company website in their area. Targeting that exact phrase wouldn’t require in-depth keyword research.
However, what if the exact match keyword isn’t generating enough search volume and the roofing company needs to expand their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.
The next steps might involve the paid advertising manager discussing with the roofing company about what types of products / services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.
For instance, the paid ads manager might discover high search volume for “nearby roofing companies” or even “roofing contractor services.” The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. If the service is extensive, the second phrase might result in a more lucrative opportunity.
Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. Negative keywords are used to stop your paid advertising from showing in search queries that you know won’t bring in homeowners.
For example, someone looking for “free services from roofing companies” or “how to advertise to roofing contractors” isn’t likely to convert with your roofing company. However, they might see your paid advertising if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like “free” or “advertise“.
As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.
2.) Audience Research Tips
For roofing company paid advertising campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.
Let’s go over a little history on audience research and targeting within the Facebook Ads platform.
In years past, roofing contractor-focused paid advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which roofing contractors lined up to exploit.
As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.
In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. This even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.
Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad agencies for roofing contractors. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.
While there will still be plenty of roofing company PPC advertising firms relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every upgrade within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for “Advantage Detailed Targeting.”
Interested in another take on audience targeting? Social Media Examiner’s blog article does a good job of explaining recent changes.
However, audience research and targeting aren’t going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within roofing contractor ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.
3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips
The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your roofing company paid advertising campaigns.
When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign for roofing contractors, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:
- Is there a benefit-focused headline?
- Are there any images above the fold?
- Is the content written in a compelling manner?
- Am I able to find a lead form right away?
- Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
- Does the page load quickly?
- Is there social proof?
- Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?
There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.
Please, don’t spend money on PPC advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.
4.) Revenue Funnel Tips
As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.
For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:
- We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
- We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
- We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
- We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.
There are many different types of funnels, so your roofing company isn’t limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.
5.) Conversion Rate Optimization Tips
Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.
Let’s run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.
- You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
- You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your site you sell 1 product or service.
- You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
- To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
- Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.
For most roofing companies, this return on ad spend wouldn’t be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.
To improve the situation, you hire a PPC advertising company to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.
Let’s assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.
Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.
6.) Ad Creation Tips
This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.
When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for roofing contractors, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.
You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone’s attention in a split second.
To do this, you need to build out awesome ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, “wait a second, what…?“
This doesn’t happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.
If you don’t change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you’ll suffer from what is called “ad fatigue.” This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.
Don’t be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn’t performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.
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