If you’re a roofer or local service business and you’ve ever wondered “How do Google Ads actually work?” — this is the only guide you need. Forget the overcomplicated jargon, forget agencies making it sound mystical, and forget the idea that you need a fancy website. You don’t.
You just need three things:
That’s it.
Let’s break it down in the simplest way possible.
Imagine this:
Mary is sitting in her home in Dublin.
There’s a storm outside. The rain is hammering off the roof.
Suddenly she notices a leak. She panics. She grabs her phone — Mary’s phone — and types:
“roofer near me”
She wants help right now.
And this is where your Google Ads come into play.
When someone in your area types in that keyword, Google shows sponsored results at the very top of the page. This is where your ad can appear with a headline like:
Roofer Dublin – Fast Repairs & Free Quotes
Mary sees your ad, taps it, and lands on your page.
That’s all Google Ads is in its simplest form:
Mary searches → your ad appears → she clicks → she visits your landing page → she calls you.
A landing page is not a full website.
It’s a single, distraction-free page built to convert.
If Mary is looking for a roofer in Dublin, the page she lands on must say:
It should have:
Roofers lose money because they send people to a general homepage that doesn’t match what the customer searched for. If Mary searches “gutter repairs”, and you send her to a page about roof replacements, she leaves. Simple as that.
Here’s something most roofers don’t know:
A lot of agencies set up the Google Ads account in their name — not yours.
When you stop paying them, they shut it down, and you lose everything.
That’s why I always tell businesses:
Step 1: Create your own Google Ads account.
Step 2: Give your marketer manager access.
The account stays yours forever.
No agency should ever control your leads or your data.
Once your account exists, we build your campaigns around real searches — exactly what people type into Google.
For roofers, this usually includes:
But here’s where most people go wrong: the wrong keyword match types.
[roofer near me]
This only targets people searching very closely for that exact phrase.
“roofer near me”
This targets any search containing those words in that order.
roofer near me
This is where everything goes wrong.
With broad match, Google can show your ad for anything even loosely related:
This is why so many roofers waste hundreds.
Broad match is like handing Google your credit card and saying “go nuts”.
Mary might be searching:
These are different problems.
So they need different ads.
And more importantly, different landing pages.
If Mary searches for chimney repairs and you send her to a generic roofing page, she clicks back and your money is wasted.
When everything is segmented properly, it looks like this:
This is the secret to high-performing roofing campaigns.
If you don’t track conversions, you’re blind.
Conversion tracking tells you:
Without this data, you don’t know:
Roofers who say “Google Ads didn’t work” almost always had no tracking.
Negative keywords stop your ads appearing for irrelevant searches.
This saves you a fortune.
For example:
Search: “chimney cleaning Dublin”
Your ad: “chimney repairs Dublin”
Google thinks: “close enough!”
But they’re not the same.
One is a €60 job.
The other is a €600 job.
So you add chimney cleaning to your negative list.
Over time, this filters out all the bad clicks and tightens your ads into a powerful, profitable system.
Because 90% of campaigns are set up like this:
This will fail every single time.
A proper Google Ads setup looks more like this:
Run like this, Google Ads becomes the most reliable lead-gen system a roofer can have.
Once you understand how Google Ads actually work, it all becomes simple:
Mary needs help → she Googles → your ad appears → your page matches → she calls.
When everything lines up, the leads flow consistently and the cost per lead drops month after month.
If you want a proper, fully segmented, high-converting Google Ads system built for your roofing business — I can do it for you.
Just send me a message and I’ll show you:
