The roofing searches you are paying for and should not be

Job seekers are the biggest single leak

'Roofing jobs', 'roofer wanted', 'roofing apprenticeship', 'roofing labourer' — these are people looking for employment, and there are a great many of them. Broad and phrase match will serve your ad to all of them unless you have told Google not to.

This is usually the largest single category of waste in a roofing account, and it is the easiest to eliminate. Blocking the employment words takes five minutes and frequently cuts a fifth off the bill with no loss of enquiries.

• —jobs, job, vacancy, vacancies, hiring, wanted, apprentice, apprenticeship
• —salary, wage, wages, pay, career, careers, recruitment, cv

DIY and price research

'How to fix a roof leak', 'roof felt B&Q', 'how to replace a slate' — someone is going up the ladder themselves. 'Roofing materials', 'roof tiles price', 'roofing supplies near me' — someone is buying materials, not labour.

Some of these are arguable. A person researching how to fix a leak sometimes gives up and rings a roofer. But they click at a high rate and convert at a very low one, and on a limited budget they are displacing somebody who is ready to buy.

• —how to, diy, yourself, tutorial, video, youtube
• —b&q, woodie's, screwfix, wickes, supplies, wholesale, materials, sheets, felt roll

Courses, training and qualifications

'Roofing course', 'roofing certificate', 'roof safety training', 'solas roofing' — education searches, and they are more common than most roofers expect.

In Limerick and Cork especially, broad university and college traffic drifts into trade campaigns and quietly eats budget.

• —course, courses, training, qualification, certificate, diploma, college, solas, city and guilds

Wrong locations and wrong countries

Google's default location setting is 'presence or interest', which means your Dublin roofing ad can be shown to somebody in Manchester reading about Dublin. Set it to presence only — people in or regularly in your locations — and a whole category of nonsense disappears.

Add the obvious geographic negatives too: UK cities, US states and the counties you genuinely do not serve. A roofer in Galway paying for Belfast clicks is not rare.

The free and cheap crowd

'Free roof inspection' and 'roof grant' searches can be fine if you offer those things and say so. If you do not, they are expensive disappointments on both sides.

'Cheap roofer', 'cheapest roof repair' — you can take a view on these. Our experience is that the jobs are small, the customers are difficult and the margin is not there.

• —free, grant, cheap, cheapest, budget, second hand, used

How to find your own

The lists above are a starting point, not an answer. The real list comes from your own search terms report, which shows the actual phrases people typed before clicking your ad. It is under Insights in the Google Ads interface and most roofers have never opened it.

Read it once a week for the first month and once a month after that. Every wasted term you block is money moved to the searches that do become jobs, which on a roofing budget is the difference between the channel working and the channel not.

If you would rather somebody else did it, send us the account name and we will read the search terms report and tell you what it is spending on. That part is free and takes us about an hour.