Published November 4, 2026 · by Luis Gomez · The only numbers I present as facts are from one drywall company’s dashboards, my father’s, screenshotted in the case study; every roofing figure here is a labelled example or Google’s own estimate for your ZIP.
Short answer: The cheapest roofing leads come from a Google Business Profile with the primary category “Roofing contractor”, reviews that mention the insurance claim, and photos of finished roofs. Next is Local Services Ads, where Roofing is a real category and you pay per charged lead, not per click. Then a website that sells the free inspection, one page per job type. Referral partners and honest canvassing after a storm fill in the rest. I have not run a roofing account; my published numbers are drywall, about $37 to $47 per charged lead, April to July 2026. Roofing figures here are rules of thumb; pull Google’s estimate for your ZIP.
If you can tear off and dry in a roof in a day but the phone only rings the week after hail, this is the list I’d hand you, ranked by what a lead costs to get. I publish drywall numbers, from Patch-It-Now, my father’s repair company in Lee’s Summit, Missouri; below is how the same plan maps to roofing, with every roofing figure labelled as the example it is. The condensed version is the marketing for roofers page.
First, the math a roofing job has to clear
Work backward from what a booked job leaves you, not the invoice; a $14,000 roof has shingles, a dumpster and a crew in it. Say a replacement clears $3,000 after materials and labor and one in four inspections signs: an inspection is worth about $750 to you. Say a repair bills $800, leaves you $400, and half the callers book: a repair lead is worth about $200. Both are illustrations. Fill in yours.
| Your number | Repair (example) | Replacement (example) |
|---|---|---|
| What the job leaves you after materials and labor | $400 | $3,000 |
| Close rate | 1 in 2 calls booked | 1 in 4 inspections signed |
| What a lead is worth to you | $200 | $750 |
| Max you should pay per lead (about a third) | $66 | $250 |
The one-third rule is the same in every trade: a lead should be worth at least three times what it costs, and if under 40 percent of paid calls close, the problem is the phone, not the ads. The rule and the five-minute way to pull Google’s own estimate for your ZIP are in LSA cost per lead by trade. Roofing is on the short list of trades that push cost per lead up (big ticket, urgent job types), so run the sheet for repairs and again for replacements; storm claims are set by the deductible and the adjuster, not your price list.
Now the channels, cheapest first.
1. The Google map listing (free, and the screen that decides local or storm-chaser)
When the hail stops, the homeowner is holding a flyer from a crew with a magnet on the truck and a phone open to “roof repair near me”. The map pack is where they check whether you’re real. What to fix, in order:
- Primary category set to exactly “Roofing contractor”. Not “Contractor”, not “Construction company”. It’s the biggest ranking lever on the map, and the one a crew gets wrong when it spins up a listing for a market it will leave when the claims dry up.
- Service-area business, address hidden if you work from a yard or home, with the towns you’ll actually drive to as service areas (Google caps it at 20). Google’s idea of local is proximity to a verified address; an out-of-state crew can’t fake that.
- Photos: finished roofs with the street visible so a neighbor recognizes the block, your crew on the roof in your shirts, drone shots of a completed replacement.
- Reviews that mention the insurance claim. Roofing customers fear being ripped off on a claim and a crew that disappears. Ask at the truck the day the roof is finished, by text, with the profile’s review link, and ask them to say what happened: “walked us through the adjuster meeting”. Reply naming the job. Patch-It-Now sits at 5.0 stars and 89 reviews, above a national franchise with hundreds, because the ask happens within the hour.
- Services listed by the words homeowners type: roof replacement, roof repair, storm damage roof repair, hail damage inspection, leak repair, metal roofing, flat roofing, and gutters or siding only if you do them.
- Seed the Q&A: Do you work with insurance claims? Is the inspection free? Are you local? Licensed and insured? How fast after a storm?
I can’t give you a roofing number here. The drywall one: 120 calls straight from the Business Profile, February to July 2026, about 21 a month once everything else was running, at zero cost. The full 31-point list is the Business Profile checklist; the setup order is on the Business Profile service page.
2. Local Services Ads for roofers (pay per lead, and the badge the storm-chasers don’t have)
Roofing is a Local Services Ads category. The ads sit at the top of the page with the Google Verified checkmark, and screening is what a crew from three states away has the hardest time passing on short notice. Screening (license, insurance, background check) is set per category and differs by state; check the sign-up flow for your state. Google Verified replaced Google Guaranteed on October 20, 2025, and the money-back guarantee ended November 7, 2025 (the badge, explained; every category).
You pay per charged lead (a call, message or booking), never per click. Google’s automated review checks every charged lead within about 72 hours and credits the invalid ones; there’s been no dispute button since mid-2024, so rate every bad lead “Very dissatisfied” the day it lands. What decides whether it pays for a roofer:
- Job types. If the category in your market lists gutter or siding work you don’t do, switch it off. Since Google cut the “job type not serviced” credit, job-type selection is the only filter you have.
- Screening done in the quiet months. The crews that own the week after hail got verified in March. The surge lands on whoever was already set up, ranked and reviewed.
- A weekly budget that stays on all week. A starved budget turns the ads off for the back half of the week, which is what was happening in my father’s account in April 2026. For a roofer that can mean going dark the day the storm hits.
- Answer the phone. From October 1, 2026, a missed call during listed business hours can be charged as a lead if the caller stays on the line more than about 20 seconds. If the whole company is on a roof, calls forward to someone on the ground (details).
- The migration. From August 2026 Google is moving these ads into Google Ads as a pay-per-lead Performance Max campaign type. Export your lead history before your account moves; the weekly budget becomes a daily budget (divided by 7) with a monthly cap of the daily figure times 30.4 (what carries over; the budget arithmetic).
What it costs: I won’t give you a roofing cost per lead, because I haven’t run one and every table that claims to is a vendor average. The account I publish is drywall, run through a neighboring category, and after Google’s credits it ran $36.77 to $46.66 per charged lead from April to July 2026, 52 charged leads in July. Expect roofing to cost more per lead; big-ticket trades and urgent job types push the number up. It only has to be under a third of what an inspection is worth to you. Start the sign-up for Roofing in your ZIP, screenshot the estimated cost per lead and leads per week on the budget step, and compare it to the table above. How I run these ads.
3. A website that sells the inspection, not the roof
Nobody buys a $14,000 roof from a web page. They book a free inspection from one. So every page ends the same way: schedule the inspection.
- One page per money job: replacement, repair, storm and hail damage, leak repair, metal, flat and low-slope, gutters only if you do them.
- Real price ranges. The roofer page’s ballpark is $400 to $1,500 for repairs and $8,000 to $20,000 for replacements, storm claims set by the deductible and the adjuster; put your own up. Ranges filter the tire-kickers before they cost you a ladder climb.
- An insurance-claim page in plain English: the adjuster meeting, the deductible, what you will and won’t do. It’s what the homeowner reads at 10 p.m. after the knock on the door.
- Phone in the header, tap-to-call, a three-field form on every page, financing mentioned once. A drywall site I rebuilt went from a 1.93% to a 10.51% conversion rate just by making the ask (the story).
The site is the floor for December: the ads chase emergencies, the site ranks for planned replacements all year. For scale, Patch-It-Now’s quote form went live May 31, 2026 and brought 21 requests in June and 29 in July with paid search off (the drywall guide). What I build: websites that rank.
4. Google Ads search campaigns (small, exact match, after the first three)
Exact-match terms like “roof repair {city}” and “hail damage roof repair {city}” work; broad match buys “roofing jobs hiring” and “how to patch a roof yourself”. Run it small, with call tracking, negatives for jobs, supplies and DIY, and an ad schedule that matches when the phone is answered. The roofing-specific use is a separate storm campaign you can turn up the week after hail, with the budget decided in advance, not at 9 p.m. with ice on the lawn. How I run search campaigns.
5. Referral partners who see the roof before the homeowner does
The home inspector finds the bad roof on a pre-sale walk. The realtor needs a repair or a certification before closing. The property manager has a tenant with a stain on the ceiling. The restoration company is drying a living room and the water came from above. The gutter and siding crews are already on the roofline. Some HOAs hand out an approved-vendor list after a storm. Make a list of 30 across those groups, drop off a card and a one-line offer (“send me the report or a photo, I’m on the roof within two days, your client never hears a price you didn’t approve”), and check in monthly. Slow to start, then it doesn’t stop. Insurance adjusters belong on the list only where your state allows it, and only as the contractor whose photo reports and itemized estimates are easy to work from.
6. Canvassing after the storm, done honestly
Door-knocking after hail is the storm-chaser’s channel, and it works. You can do it too, with the one advantage they can’t copy: you’re local, verified, and still here in March. The honest version: your own trucks with your name on them, company shirts, a card with a local address and a license number where your state issues one. The offer is a free inspection with a written photo report, not a free roof. Show the map listing and the reviews on your phone, not a clipboard to sign. Some cities require a solicitation permit and plenty of doors have no-knock signs; respect both. Then put the storm on the listing: that block’s finished roofs with the street visible, reviews that mention the claim, a storm-damage page that names the neighborhood.
What I would not do
- Buy storm lead lists. A list of addresses in the hail path can be sold to every roofer in the metro the same morning, and plenty of those homeowners already signed with the crew that knocked first.
- Shared leads from the big marketplaces. Four roofers calling one homeowner, and you pay whether or not they pick up. Leads you own get cheaper every month; bought leads never do.
- “Free roof” and “we’ll cover your deductible” promises. In some states offering to waive or pay an insurance deductible is against the law, and everywhere it’s the storm-chaser’s pitch. Check the rules in your state; this is not legal advice.
The 30-day plan
| Week | Do this |
|---|---|
| 1 | Business Profile: “Roofing contractor” category, service areas you drive to, 10 photos of finished roofs with the street visible, services list, Q&A seeded, review link saved as a text template. Website: phone in the header, form on every page. |
| 2 | Local Services Ads: start screening for your state now, not the day of the storm; job types on for what you do, off for what you don’t; a weekly budget that stays on all week; calls forwarded to someone on the ground. |
| 3 | Referral list of 30 (home inspectors, realtors, property managers, restoration, gutter and siding, HOAs); first pass. Add a storm-damage page and an insurance-claim page with price ranges. |
| 4 | Read the numbers: charged leads, cost per charged lead, calls from the map, inspections booked and signed. Kill nothing yet; most channels need eight weeks. Ask every finished customer for a review at the truck. |
Questions roofers ask
How do I get roofing leads without buying them? Three screens the homeowner checks before signing: a Google Business Profile with the “Roofing contractor” category and claim-process reviews, Local Services Ads in the Roofing category screened before the storm, and a website that sells a free inspection with a page per job type. Then 30 referral partners who see roofs before homeowners do.
How much do roofing leads cost? I haven’t run a roofing account, so I don’t publish a roofing number. My drywall account ran about $37 to $47 per charged lead in the Kansas City metro, April to July 2026, and roofing sits with the trades that cost more per lead. Pull Google’s own estimate for Roofing in your ZIP from the sign-up flow and compare it to a third of what an inspection is worth to you.
How do I compete with storm-chasers after a hail storm? Out-rank them instead of out-knocking them: verified Local Services Ads already running, a map listing anchored to a local address with claim-process reviews, and a storm-damage page that already ranks. An out-of-state crew can’t fake a local address, a year of reviews or a badge earned through screening.
Do Local Services Ads work for roofers? Roofing is a Local Services Ads category, so you run it directly, no side door. You pay per charged lead, invalid ones are credited within about 72 hours, and it pays for a company that answers the phone and books inspections the same day. Do the screening in the quiet months so the ads are ranked when the weather turns.
How do I keep the phone ringing between storms? The map listing and the website rank for planned replacements, leak repairs and inspections all year while the ads scale with the weather, and referral partners send work in December because their work doesn’t stop.
Should I offer a free roof or cover the deductible to win storm jobs? No. In some states paying or waiving an insurance deductible is illegal, and everywhere it’s the storm-chaser’s pitch. Offer a free inspection with a written photo report instead, and check the rules in your state.
Want the roofing version of this built before the next storm? The roofer plan shows what I’d run. Or send me your number and I’ll record a short walkthrough of your map listing, ads and site, with the three fixes I’d make first, free, whether or not you hire me. Get the free audit →