A roofer with a marketing budget has one real question: where does the money go first? Ads feel like the obvious answer - you pay, the phone rings. But if the site they land on doesnt convert, you are not buying leads. You are buying visitors who leave. Fix that first, then buy traffic, then protect the calls the traffic creates. Here is the order, with a fair hearing for every option at each step.

Step one: find out what your site is actually doing

Before you spend anything, you need one number: how many people visit your site in a month, and how many of those contact you? If you dont know it, you cannot tell whether ads will help or whether you are pouring money into a hole.

Open Google Analytics (or ask whoever built the site to pull it). Look at sessions for the last 90 days, then look at how many enquiry form submissions or phone-link clicks happened in the same window. Divide enquiries by sessions. A reasonable roofing site converts somewhere between 2% and 5% of visitors into a genuine contact. Below 2% and the site is the problem, not the traffic.

If you dont have tracking set up at all, that is itself the answer: you are flying blind, and buying ads into that situation means you will never know whether they worked.

Do this tonight, takes five minutes:

  • Open an incognito window and search your own business name. Does your site appear? Does it look like something you would trust with a £4,000 roof job?
  • Find your contact or enquiry page. Count the steps between landing and sending a message. More than two clicks is friction that costs you jobs.
  • Call your own number from a different phone. How many rings before it answers? Does it go to voicemail? If it does, write down how many calls you think you miss in a week - we will come back to that number.

Step two: the site problem - three honest options

Say your conversion rate is under 2%, or the site looks like it was built in 2014, or there is no tracking at all. You have three options.

Option 1: Do nothing and run ads anyway. Some roofers do this. The logic is that a bad site still converts someone, and ads bring enough volume to make the maths work. The honest problem: you are paying for every visitor, so a 1% conversion rate on paid traffic costs you roughly twice as much per lead as a 2% rate would. You are not fixing the leak, you are running the tap harder. It works until the budget runs out.

Option 2: Buy an off-the-shelf website. Platforms like Wix or Squarespace let you build something passable for a low monthly fee - their published plans start around £13-17 a month. If your current site is genuinely embarrassing and you have no budget for anything else, this is better than nothing. The gap: a template built for a generic trades business will not have the specific trust signals a roofing customer needs (insurance certificates, local area coverage, photos of real completed jobs, a clear emergency line). It will look fine and convert poorly for the same reasons your current site does.

Option 3: Fix the actual conversion problems first. This means putting a clear phone number at the top of every page, adding one or two photos of real local jobs with the street or town named, cutting the contact form to three fields maximum, and making sure Google Analytics is tracking enquiries so you can measure what changes. This is the option we would take. Not because it is us saying it - because the arithmetic is simple: doubling your conversion rate from 1% to 2% halves the cost of every lead you ever buy, for as long as you run the site. Every pound you spend on ads after that goes twice as far.

Step three: now buy traffic - but only the right kind

Once the site converts, ads make sense. For a roofer, Google Search ads, targeting terms like “emergency roofer [town]” or “roof repair [county]”, put you in front of someone who already has a problem and is already looking. That is a different proposition from Facebook ads, which interrupt someone who was not thinking about their roof at all. Both have their place, but search ads are closer to the moment of need, which is where a roofer earns their margin.

The one thing to check before you go live: is your Google Business Profile complete? Name, address, phone, opening hours, five or more recent reviews. Google shows that profile alongside your ads and your organic result. A profile with no reviews next to a competitor with forty is a conversion problem you cannot solve with ad spend.

Step four: protect the calls the ads create

This is the step most roofers skip. You fix the site, you run the ads, the phone rings - and you miss the call because you are on a roof. That missed call almost certainly goes to the next roofer on the list. Work out what that costs you: take your average job value, multiply it by the number of calls you think you miss in a week, multiply by 52. That number is what an unanswered phone costs you in a year. Dont invent it - use your own numbers, even a rough guess is more useful than ignoring it.

There are options here too: a call-answering service, a simple AI receptionist that takes a message and texts you the details, or a voicemail with a same-day callback promise. Any of them beats silence.

The honest order

Measure first. Fix conversion. Then buy traffic. Then answer the phone. Run them in the wrong order and each step wastes the one before it. Run them in the right order and the same budget does three times the work.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your site - what it is doing, where it is leaking enquiries, and whether ads make sense yet - we can look at it with you. We will tell you what we actually see, including if the honest answer is that you dont need us.