From a brand-new Google Ads account to 25 qualified leads a month in 60 days

A local, family-owned roofing and siding company for homeowners: over 19 years in business, BBB accredited. It serves a large metro area and its suburbs: roof replacement and repair, siding, gutters, storm damage. A strong local reputation built on referrals.

What it didn't have was any Google Ads history: no account, no Quality Score, no conversion data. And competitors in this market had been running ads for months.

Roofing is one of the most expensive local services on Google Ads. The average click costs about $22, and more during storm season. Competitors had months of data training their Smart Bidding. Every wasted click costs real money, and high-ticket services get few searches, so there is even less room for error.

This is the kind of account where many agencies lose money in the first 90 days, blame “the market” and ask for a bigger budget. We took a different path: clean data first.

Every decision in the first 60 days served signal quality, not click volume. In an expensive market it's tempting to turn on Smart Bidding (Google's automated bidding) right away and let the algorithm “figure it out.” But Smart Bidding is only as smart as its conversion data, and a new account has none. Automating too early means swings, wasted budget and a long learning period.

The first month was slow — by design. With manual cost per click and exact match only, click volume was limited on purpose, and conversions came in slowly. It was tempting to turn on Target CPA early to “speed things up.” We didn't: we've seen this pattern before. A new account with 8 conversions turns on Target CPA, the algorithm has nothing to rely on, two weeks of budget go to irrelevant signals, and the account ends up worse than before.

In month two there was also a budget conversation. Market clicks at times reached $28 versus the $22 baseline, so we recommended a bigger budget to stay visible in the auction. The client agreed, and it paid off in month three.

By month three the account was bringing in about 25 qualified leads a month at an average of $180 per lead. The landing page converted 6% of visitors. Smart Bidding was on and stayed within the $120 Target CPA for non-brand traffic, with some flexibility for competitor and storm searches.

With an average job of $10,000+, even a modest close rate pays for the ads many times over: the revenue from one roof replacement is enough to pay for about 55 leads. From month three on, the ads paid for themselves.

Most importantly, the company now has a predictable flow of leads it can plan around, not just referrals that come whenever they come.

Daily conversions (calls and forms) grew steadily through the first month of optimization, sped up in the second, and peaked during a regional hail storm in mid-November. The structure was tight, the landing page optimized and the tracking reliable, so the account turned the spike in demand into real leads. A poorly built account would either have wasted the budget on irrelevant clicks or run out of it by midday and missed the peak.