A new Google Ads campaign arrives the way a rental truck does: gassed up, keys in, and set up for somebody else's trip. Every setting has a default, and most of them lean toward showing more ads, in more places, to more people. For a roofer with crews in one metro and a phone that has to be answered, several of those defaults quietly send money to places your trucks will never park.
None of this is hidden. It's all on the settings page, a few clicks in. It's just easy to skip on the way to the fun part. This chapter is the fifteen minutes before launch that decide whether the keywords, bids and ads from the last three chapters get a fair test.
Presence or Interest Pays for Roofing Clicks From Outside Your Service Area
Location targeting has two parts: where you target, and who counts as being there. The second part lives under "Location options," and most roofers never open it.
Google's default is called Presence or Interest. According to Google's help page, it reaches people who are in your target area or regularly there, plus people who have shown interest in it, which Google can judge from the words they search, places they were recently, or content they've read about the location. Google calls this the recommended option, and for a travel company or a university, it makes sense. People plan trips to places they aren't in yet.
A roof doesn't work that way. A homeowner who needs a roofer in Burnsville is almost always standing in Burnsville, or in the office down the road from it. The same help page says to consider the other option, Presence, when you only want to reach people in your locations rather than people elsewhere who are interested in them. That describes a roofing company exactly. Presence still counts people who are regularly in your area, so the homeowner who commutes into your service area every day and searches from the office is still covered.
Our method sets Presence on every roofing campaign at launch. Google warns that most campaigns see fewer impressions after switching away from the default, and that's the point. The impressions you lose are the ones that couldn't turn into a signed roof anyway.
Presence isn't a wall, though. Google describes location targeting as its best effort, built on signals like device settings and behavior, so a few clicks from outside your area will still get through. That's why the setting is only half the job. The other half is the map itself.
A Roofer's Service Area Is Where the Crews Drive, Not the Whole Metro
Once "who counts" is settled, draw the line itself. The mistake here is targeting the metro because that's what the business card says.
In our example market, Minneapolis-St. Paul, three roofing companies describe their territory in three very different ways on their own websites:
- Kaufman Roofing serves "Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding Twin Cities region."
- Crown Roofing & Restoration covers "the Twin Cities metro, greater Minnesota & western Wisconsin."
- Stinson Services lists offices in Edina, Rochester, Eau Claire and Sioux Falls.
None of those is wrong. But the ad account should follow where the crews actually drive at a profit, not the widest line on the website. A crew that loses two hours of every day to the drive to a far suburb is a crew doing fewer roofs, and the job math from Chapter 3 assumed they'd be on a roof, not on the highway.
Target by the cities or ZIP codes you want the work from, and leave out the ones you'd rather not drive to, even if they're inside the metro. For a roofer with more than one office, split the campaigns by office. Each office gets its own budget, its own call tracking number and its own service-area pages from Chapter 4, so a slow week in one market doesn't quietly steal the budget from a busy one.
After a hailstorm, this is the setting you'll be tempted to change. If the storm hit a town at the edge of your map and you can actually staff jobs there, add it deliberately, with its own ad group and page. Don't do it by widening the whole campaign.
Search Partners Come Switched On, and Google Won't Say Where Your Roofing Ad Ran
In the "Networks" section, a new Search campaign starts with a box already checked: Google search partners. Google's help page confirms they're included by default. Partners are other sites that run Google's search ads on their own pages, and they can place and style the ads their own way.
Here's the part that matters for a roofer on a fixed budget. For a regular Search campaign, Google's help page says it doesn't tell you which website your ad appeared on. You can see how partner traffic did in total. You can't see where it came from.
Our method turns search partners off at launch. The Isolation campaign from Chapter 6 exists to learn what a real roofing lead looks like on Google's own results page. Mixing in clicks from sites you can't name makes that lesson murkier. Once Isolation has a few months of booked inspections behind it, you can test partners on purpose and compare. On the same page, Google also tells advertisers having performance problems to check their Display Network settings. Make sure the Display Network is off too. A roofing search campaign has no business showing banner ads on a recipe blog.
AI Max Switches On in Every New Roofing Campaign and Writes Ad Text You Never Saw
The newest default is the biggest one. Google's help page says new Search campaigns have AI Max turned on by default, and two of its features come switched on with it:
- Text customization writes new headlines and descriptions from your website, landing pages, existing ads and keywords. Google's help page says these generated assets are eligible to serve as soon as they're created.
- Final URL expansion can land a hail-damage searcher on some other page of your site instead of the hail page you chose, if Google decides that page fits the search better. It depends on text customization, so it runs only while that's on.
There's also a quiet upgrade. Google's text customization FAQ says that starting in September 2026, campaigns using the old automatically created assets are upgraded to AI Max automatically. A roofer who switched that setting on years ago may already be running it.
For a roofing company this is a direct collision with the last three chapters. Chapter 8 wrote headlines from homeowners' own reviews and kept every claim to what the roofer actually does. Text customization can put a line in front of a homeowner that nobody at your company wrote or checked. Final URL expansion can skip the hail page you built in Chapter 4 for a page Google likes better, and Google's help page adds that pinned headlines aren't used when it picks a different page.
Our method switches AI Max off when the campaign is built. Then check the two features underneath it before you publish. Google's help page notes that turning text customization off also turns Final URL expansion off, so if either one still shows as on, the switch didn't take.
Either way, the reasoning is the same: AI Max works much like broad match, and broad match waits until the account has the conversion history to steer it. Chapter 13 covers when AI Max earns its way back in, and how to fence it when it does.
Google Now Picks the Roofing Ad Whose Language Matches the Search
Older guides tell you to set the campaign language. As of September 2026, for Search campaigns, that setting is gone. Google's help page says Search ads now match automatically based on the language of the ads themselves, and when a search is in a clear language, Google gives priority to the ad and landing page in that language.
For most roofers, nothing changes: write the ads in English, and they show to people who search in English. But if part of your service area speaks Spanish at home, the path is now clear. A Spanish-speaking homeowner searching for roof repair gets the Spanish ad only if one exists. Build it properly: its own ad group, headlines written the way Spanish-speaking homeowners describe the problem, and a landing page in Spanish with a phone line that someone who speaks Spanish answers. An English page behind a Spanish ad is the fastest way to lose that call.
Auto-Tagging and Call Reporting Are How You'll Know Which Click Sold the Roof
Not every default is a trap, and some settings need to be switched on or kept on before launch:
- Auto-tagging on. It adds the click ID that Chapter 1 relies on to match a booked inspection back to the click that started it. Without it, a signed roof can't be traced to a keyword.
- Call reporting on. Roofing leads arrive by phone. Call reporting is what lets a call from the ad count, and lets you see which calls lasted long enough to be real.
- Rotation that favors your winners. The ad rotation setting should lean toward the ads homeowners click and call from, so the review-based headlines that work get shown more.
- Your brand in its own campaign. Searches for your company name are the cheapest leads you'll ever get, and they flatter every number they touch. Keep them in their own campaign so the Isolation campaign's cost per lead is honest.
- A lower starting budget. Launching lower lets you read real bid estimates and search terms for a week before you open the tap.
- Broad match off in Isolation. Chapter 6 covered why. Check it anyway: new ad groups can slip in with a default match type you didn't choose.
Then look at the settings page one more time, top to bottom, before you click Publish. It's the cheapest fifteen minutes in the whole account.
Next: Keeping Roof Clicks Off Your Careers Page
The Search account is now built, fenced and tracked. Sooner or later Google will suggest Performance Max: one campaign, one budget, spread across Search, YouTube, Maps and the rest, with its own defaults that can land a roof click on a page you never picked. Chapter 10 covers when a roofer should launch it and how to keep it inside the lines.
The full series is on the roofers guide home, and when a roofing company wants someone else checking every setting before launch, that's what our Google Ads management does.
