Performance Max is the campaign that sounds easiest to run, and it's easy to see why. Hand it a budget, a few roof photos and some headlines, and your company shows up on video, in inboxes, on maps and in search results at once. You don't pick keywords. You don't pick placements. You pick a goal and hand over the keys.
That's also the problem. A roofer who hands over the keys without fencing the yard can find out later where the truck went: a hail-damage search that landed on the careers page, a search for your own company name counted as a new lead, a video Google stitched together from your logo and a house that isn't yours. None of that is a bug. It's Performance Max doing what it was set up to do. This chapter is about setting it up to do something else.
Performance Max Spends One Roofing Budget Across Six Google Channels
Google's help page describes Performance Max as a goal-based campaign that reaches all of Google's ad inventory from a single campaign: YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You give it assets (headlines, descriptions, images, video), a goal, and hints about who your customers are. Google decides where each dollar goes.
For a roofer, that reach is real. The same homeowner who searched "hail damage roof repair" on Tuesday watches YouTube on Wednesday and checks Maps on Thursday. Performance Max can follow them across all three. But it only works if it already knows what a good roofing lead looks like, and it learns that from your conversion history.
That's why our method holds Performance Max back until months six or seven. By then, the Isolation campaign from Chapter 6 has shown which searches book inspections, and the Exploration campaign has taught Google's bidding what a roofing lead is worth. A brand-new roofing account running it in week one is asking a stranger to find your customers with no idea who they are, on six channels at once.
When it does launch, keep the setup simple:
- The goal is conversions, the booked inspections and qualified calls from Chapter 1. Not conversion value. Not clicks.
- No target cost per lead at launch. Give it a few weeks of booked inspections first. The target comes from what those inspections actually cost, not from a number you hoped for.
- Location set to Presence, exactly as Chapter 9 set it for Search.
Final URL Expansion Can Land a Homeowner on Your Job Listings
Every Performance Max asset group has a Final URL, the page you want people to land on. Then there's a setting called Final URL expansion. Google's help page says it's turned on by default, and it lets the campaign swap your chosen page for another page on the same domain when Google thinks that page fits the search better. Google's own page admits the swap can put an ad in front of the wrong page unless you've excluded the pages you don't want used.
Look at what's actually on a roofing company's website. When we checked the home pages of ten roofing and exterior companies in our example market, Minneapolis-St. Paul, two hosted a careers or employment page on their own domain, and eight had a blog. A careers page is full of the word "roofing." So is a blog post about how long shingles last. To an algorithm matching words, both can look like a fit for a roofing search. To a homeowner with water coming through the ceiling, neither is.
You have two choices:
- Switch the swapping off. Google's help page says turning it off can help prevent unexpected URLs. Every click lands on the page you picked, which for a roofer should be one of the service pages from Chapter 4.
- Keep it on and fence it. Google lets you exclude specific URLs, or whole sections of the site by rule. Exclude the careers page, the blog, the about page, the privacy policy and anything else a homeowner shouldn't land on from an ad.
Here's the trap in the fence: Google won't let you exclude the page the asset group itself points to. If the asset group points at your home page, the home page is getting traffic no matter what you exclude. Point it at the service page you actually want.
For a new roofing campaign, our method starts with expansion off. After a season of booked inspections, try expansion again with the careers page and blog fenced off, and let the numbers say whether it found a better landing spot than your hail page.
Your Exact-Match Roofing Keywords Still Beat Performance Max to the Search
Roofers who've spent half a year tuning an exact-match campaign usually ask the same thing: will Performance Max poach "roof replacement near me"? Not when the search is an exact hit. Google gives the exact-match keyword in your Search campaign first claim on that query, ahead of Performance Max.
That's good news for the Isolation campaign. "Roof replacement near me" on exact match stays in Isolation, with the hand-set bid from Chapter 7. Performance Max gets whatever roofing searches you never listed.
But read the fine print on the same page. When the Search campaign has spent its day's budget, Google says Performance Max can step in on those same exact searches. The fix isn't a setting. It's money. Keep the Isolation campaign funded well enough that it isn't running out of budget by mid-afternoon, especially in storm season. An underfunded Search campaign quietly hands its best searches to the campaign you have the least control over.
Your Company Name Belongs in a Brand Exclusion, Not in Performance Max's Results
Here's how Performance Max makes itself look brilliant. Someone who already knows your company searches for it by name. They were going to call you anyway. Performance Max shows an ad, the homeowner clicks, and the campaign reports a lead at a cost that makes every other campaign look expensive.
Brand exclusions stop that. Google's help page says they keep a campaign from serving on branded searches you want to avoid, and for Performance Max they apply to Search, Shopping and YouTube search results. Add your company name, and any variations people actually type, as an excluded brand.
Your brand searches already have a home: the separate brand campaign from Chapter 9. Keep them there, where they're cheap and clearly labeled, so Performance Max has to earn its leads from people who haven't chosen a roofer yet.
Audience Signals Are Hints, and a Signed-Roof Customer List Is the Best One
Performance Max asks for audience signals, and the word matters. They're suggestions, and Google says so plainly: if the campaign thinks someone outside your signals is likely to book, it will show them the ad anyway. Signals point the campaign in a direction. They don't draw a line.
Still, a good hint shortens the learning. Our method builds the custom segments first, before the campaign exists:
- Search terms. People who searched phrases like the ones that book inspections in your Isolation campaign: roof replacement, hail damage roof inspection, roof leak repair.
- Purchase intentions. People researching roofing contractors, shingle types and roof replacement costs.
- Competitors' websites. Up to 20 competitor URLs in your area. This doesn't target their customers directly. It tells Google what kind of person visits those sites, so it can find more like them.
Then add your own data. Website visitors are the easy part. The strongest signal a roofer owns is a list of homeowners who signed. Google's Customer Match rules decide whether your account can use a customer list, and how, so check your eligibility before you build around it. Where you can use one, it tells Google exactly what a signed roof looks like.
Search Themes Are the Closest Thing to Keywords a Roofer Gets in Performance Max
Performance Max doesn't take keywords. It does take search themes, and they're the nearest thing to steering it on Search. Google's help page allows up to 25 per asset group. Google ranks a theme alongside phrase and broad keywords, not above them, and a theme still obeys your brand exclusions and the negative list at the account level.
Because themes carry the same weight as phrase and broad match, they won't pull a search away from an exact-match keyword in Isolation. They fill in around it, on the searches your Search campaigns don't already own.
Don't brainstorm them. Pull them from your data. The searches that already book inspections in Isolation are the best themes you have: roof replacement, roof repair near me, hail roof inspection, storm damage roof repair. Add the account-level negative list you started in Chapter 5, with the gutter shoppers, job seekers and do-it-yourselfers, and Performance Max inherits the same fence your Search campaigns already have.
Real Crew Photos Beat Anything Google Generates for a Roofer
Performance Max needs images and video for YouTube, Display and Discover. If you don't supply them, Google will help. Its help page describes auto-generated videos as a campaign-level setting, and it notes that when Google generates assets dynamically, you remain responsible for their accuracy.
For a roofer, that responsibility is a real risk. An auto-generated video can pair your logo with a house that has a tile roof when you only install asphalt, or show a sunny suburb when your ads run through a Minnesota February. Stock photos have the same problem in a quieter way. Homeowners have seen that smiling roofer in the white hard hat on a hundred other sites.
Supply the real thing:
- Photos of your crews on actual roofs, with the job-site cleanup homeowners praise in their reviews: tarps down, magnets out, the yard clean.
- Before and after shots of roofs you replaced, with the homeowner's permission.
- A short phone video of a real inspection: the ladder going up, the hail hits on the shingles, the photo report you hand the homeowner.
- Your best Search headlines from Chapter 8, the ones written in homeowners' words that have already earned their clicks.
Then switch off auto-generated video, and check the campaign's asset report after the first few weeks. If Google added anything you didn't write, read it before a homeowner does.
Next: Demand Gen Before the Storm
Performance Max reaches homeowners who are already looking for a roofer. The next campaign type reaches them before they know they need one: YouTube, Discover and Gmail, timed to the weeks when hail and storms are most likely to hit. Chapter 11 covers Demand Gen for roofers, and how to have your name in front of homeowners before the first hailstone lands.
The full guide is on the roofers guide home, and when a roofing company wants someone else fencing in Performance Max, that's what our Google Ads management does.
