How much should a roofer actually spend on Google Ads

Average residential roof replacement in the Midwest in 2026 is between fourteen and twenty-two thousand dollars. Take your gross margin per job. For most roofers running their own crew that sits between twenty and thirty percent, so a 22k job nets you 4,400 to 6,600 dollars before overhead.

Figure out what you can spend to win one job. If your average net is 5,000, a healthy customer acquisition cost is somewhere between 600 and 1,000 dollars per booked job. Anything higher than that and you are paying yourself last.

How many leads does it take to book a job? For roofers running clean estimate processes, a 25 percent lead-to-job rate is normal.

If you want one booked job, you need four leads. If your CAC target is 800 dollars, your max cost per lead is 200 dollars.

That CPL number is what Google Ads has to hit. Not cost per click.

A cost per click of 18 dollars is fine if your landing page converts at 10 percent and your phones are answered by a human. A cost per click of 6 dollars is a disaster if your form is broken and 80 percent of clicks bounce.

Pick a number of jobs you want to add and back into it.

If you want five booked jobs from Google Ads in a month, at 200 dollars per lead and a 25 percent close rate, you need 20 leads. That means 4,000 dollars in ad spend. Add 10 percent for testing budget on top and you are at 4,400 dollars a month for that goal.

Three things actually move the cost per lead at a roofer level.

• Match types. Most accounts I audit have phrase match terms on what should be exact match, and broad match on terms that would never come from a real customer. Tight match-type discipline cuts wasted spend by 30 to 50 percent in the first 30 days.
• Geo-targeting. If you serve a 30-mile radius, set a 30-mile radius. Google's default of "people in or interested in" pulls in renters in college towns three states away. Switch to "presence only" and shrink your radius to where you actually book jobs.
• Landing page. A roofer landing page that converts at 12 percent is normal. One that converts at 4 percent is a sign you are sending traffic to a homepage with eight competing CTAs. Build a single-page landing for the campaign, put one phone number above the fold, lead with a real photo of your crew on a roof, and put trust signals next to the form.

• Do not spend less than 1,500 a month on Google Ads as a roofer. Below that, you do not have enough data to make optimization decisions and you are basically buying clicks at random.
• Do not spend more than 10 percent of your topline revenue on paid acquisition unless you are deliberately growing. Most successful local roofers we work with sit between 5 and 8 percent.

Pull out your most recent month's ad report and run these numbers. If they do not back out to a real CAC you can live with, the problem is not "Google Ads is too expensive." The problem is somewhere in your funnel, and the spend is just exposing it.