Every roofer knows two kinds of calls. The first is the homeowner who already knows what they want: a replacement quote, a leak fixed, somebody on the roof before the next rain. The second arrives after a storm, from people who've never thought about their roof and now can't stop thinking about it, and they describe the problem in a hundred different ways.
A new Google Ads account should chase the first kind of call and wait on the second. That order is the whole idea behind this chapter, and it's where most roofing accounts go wrong on day one: they turn on broad match, hand Google a budget, and hope the machine knows the difference between a roof and a rain gutter. It doesn't. Not yet.
An Exact-Match Campaign Pays Only for the Roofing Searches You Already Know Convert
At BrandRocket we build roofing accounts from the inside out. The inside is the searches you can predict: the ones homeowners type when they've already decided to hire. The outside is everything else. You start inside.
The campaign that covers the inside is what we call Isolation: exact-match keywords, bids set by hand, pointed only at the searches you already know turn into jobs. For a roofer, that's the tight ad groups from Chapter 5:
- Replacement: "roof replacement near me," "roof replacement" plus your city, "roofing company near me."
- Repair: "roof repair near me," "roof leak repair."
- Hail and storm: "hail damage roof repair," "hail roof inspection."
- Emergency, if someone answers the phone at night.
Isolation launches in month one, alongside your brand campaign and Local Services Ads. Its job isn't volume. Its job is to buy clean, high-intent clicks, turn them into booked inspections, and give the account a track record of what a real roofing lead looks like.
Two things about those first weeks surprise roofers. The first is the bidding. On day one a roofing keyword is a stranger to Google: no clicks, no calls, no Quality Score to vouch for the ad or the hail page behind it. Early on, bid firmly on the handful of searches that matter most, toward the upper end of Keyword Planner's top-of-page range, and ease off as the account earns a track record. Starting timid on a new account usually means starting invisible.
The second is the neighbors on the page. On many of these same searches, your Local Services Ad and your Isolation ad can both appear on the page, in different spots Google chooses. That isn't waste. They're different formats reaching the same homeowner, and a roofer who shows up twice on "roof repair near me" looks like the obvious choice. Track them separately, as Chapter 1 set up, so each channel is judged on its own leads. If one of them consistently books the cheaper roofs on a given search, that's a budget decision you can make with real numbers instead of a hunch.
Exact Match Still Catches the Homeowner Who Types "Roofers Close to Me"
The name makes exact match sound stricter than it is. Google's help page explains that an exact-match keyword can also reach searches that mean the same thing or are after the same result. It isn't matching letters. It's matching intent.
Keyword Planner shows the effect. In our example market, Minneapolis-St. Paul, "roofer near me," "roofers near me" and "roofers close to me" are all reported under one shared number, 2,400 searches a month. Google treats them as the same request, and so does your exact-match keyword.
That's good news for a new account. You don't need to list every spelling, plural and word order. Pick the clearest version of each search, and let exact match catch the homeowner who types it a little differently. What you won't catch are the searches that mean something else, which is exactly the point.
Hail Week Brings Roofing Searches Nobody Would Put on a Keyword List
Now the outside. Roofing has a long tail, and it's shaped by weather.
In our example-market keyword pull, 229 ideas were about storms and hail, and most of them were tiny: a few dozen searches a month, many with no bid behind them at all. "Mn hail storm" drew 140 searches a month with no top-of-page bid behind it at all. None of these would make a sensible keyword list on their own.
Then the weather turns. "Emergency roof repair" sat at 10 searches in January and jumped to 210 in July and August. Hail searches climbed from April into June. Ice dam searches exploded in December. Each spike brings phrasings nobody planned for: a homeowner describing water coming in around a skylight, a neighbor asking who's checking roofs on their street, someone searching the name of the storm itself.
That unpredictable pile is bigger than the predictable one, and it's where a roofing account grows. You can't list it. You need a campaign that can find it, which is what broad match is for. Just not yet.
Broad Match Waits Until the Account Books 30 Roofing Leads a Month
The campaign that covers the outside is what we call Exploration. Think of it as Isolation's twin with the leash off: same ad groups and pages, but only a handful of proven roofing keywords, all on broad match, with Google's automated bidding set to Maximize Conversions and a target cost per lead keeping it honest.
Google's own guidance lines up with this. Broad match reaches everything its phrase and exact versions would, plus related searches, and Google calls automated bidding essential when you use it. Broad match is only as smart as the bidding behind it, and the bidding is only as smart as the conversions it learns from.
That's why the timing matters. Exploration waits for the exact-match campaign to prove itself, roughly 30 booked inspections and qualified calls a month, which for most roofers lands around the second or third month. Before that, broad match has nothing to learn from but guesses. After it, the account can recognize a homeowner who's likely to book an inspection, even when that homeowner types something you'd never have thought to bid on.
Give the broad-match campaign one to two months to settle. The early weeks will look messier than Isolation. That's the price of reaching searches you've never seen.
Two decisions set it up well. The first is which keywords to hand it. Pick the three to five exact-match keywords from Isolation that booked the most inspections, not the ones with the most clicks. For many roofers that's something like "roof replacement near me," the city-name replacement search and "roof repair near me." Leave out the emergency and hail keywords at first; they swing too hard with the weather to teach the account a steady pattern.
The second is the target. Start the target cost per lead near what Isolation actually paid for a lead over the last month or two, not the number you wish it were. If Isolation has been landing leads at around $200, a $120 target starves the campaign before it learns anything. Chapter 3's math tells you what you can afford per signed roof; Isolation's history tells you what leads really cost. Set the target from the second, and tighten it slowly once the campaign is producing.
Broad Match Without a Daily Search Terms Read Is a Credit Card Left on the Dashboard
Broad match needs supervision, and the tool for it is Google's search terms report. It lists what homeowners actually typed before they clicked your ad, which is often different from the keyword that triggered it.
Make it a morning habit for the broad-match campaign's first month, coffee in one hand, negative list in the other. You're hunting two things:
- Winners you never would have listed: a storm phrase, a neighborhood name, a question about a specific kind of leak. Those can move into Isolation as exact-match keywords.
- Junk that slipped through: gutter guard shoppers if you don't sell gutters, roofing job seekers, do-it-yourself questions, other roofers' names. Those go straight onto the negative list you started in Chapter 5.
A typical morning's read for a roofer might turn up a search like "roof leak around chimney flashing" (a winner worth adding to the repair group as an exact-match keyword), "roofing nailer rental" (a do-it-yourselfer, straight to negatives) and a competitor's company name followed by "reviews" (negative). Adding the winners back into Isolation is how the exact-match campaign keeps learning from the broad one.
After the first month, the list settles and weekly reads are usually enough. But in hail season, go back to daily. Every storm brings a fresh batch of phrasings, and some of them will be people who need a gutter cleaned, not a roof replaced.
The Exact-Match Campaign Doesn't Retire When Broad Match Takes Over
Once Exploration is carrying the account, it's tempting to shut Isolation off. Sometimes that's the right move. If broad match is reaching the same homeowners at a lower cost, pausing the exact-match campaign simplifies things and frees budget.
But keep it ready. Isolation is how you take back a specific search you can't afford to lose: the week after a hailstorm, when "hail damage roof repair" is suddenly worth more than anything else in the account, or when you add a new service like metal roofing and want to control exactly which searches it shows on. Switch it on, win those searches with bids you set yourself, and let Exploration keep doing its wider work. A simple test for which campaign owns a search: if losing the top of the page on it would ruin your week, it belongs in Isolation, where the bid is yours and not the algorithm's.
The two campaigns aren't a phase you pass through. They're a balance you keep adjusting, and the budget math from Chapter 3 still governs both.
Next: Top Spots Worth Winning
You now know which searches to buy first and when to let the account reach further. Next comes money: how much each roofing search deserves, and which ones earn the top of the page instead of the middle. Chapter 7 covers bidding for roofers: which searches deserve the top spot and which ones will quietly drain the budget.
If you're catching up, Chapter 2 explains why the searches where homeowners hire come first. The full series is on the roofers guide home, and our Google Ads management team builds roofing accounts in exactly this order.
