Facebook and Instagram ads for roofing companies
The creative that produces roof inspections, storm campaigns by zip code, financing offers, retargeting drone footage, and realistic budgets and lead costs.
Nobody scrolls Instagram intending to buy a roof. That is the objection every roofing owner raises, and it is correct as far as it goes. It is also why Meta ads work here in a way they do not work for emergency plumbing: on Facebook you are creating demand that did not exist this morning, and a roof is a purchase most homeowners delay for years until something makes it urgent.
Two things make it urgent. A storm, and a payment they can afford. Meta is very good at both.
Expect $20 to $80 per inspection request in most markets, against $150 to $400 for a bought roofing lead. The catch is that a Meta lead is colder. Where a Google searcher already decided she needs a roofer, a Facebook lead decided 40 seconds ago that a free inspection sounds reasonable. Plan on a lower close rate and a longer follow-up sequence.
The three campaigns that work
Storm response, geo-targeted. Within 24 hours of a hail or wind event, run video to homeowners in the affected zip codes only. Not the metro. The zip codes the storm actually crossed, which you can pull from the National Weather Service storm reports. The message is simple: we are working in your neighborhood this week, inspections are free, we tarp same day. This campaign has the highest response rate of anything in roofing, and it goes off two or three weeks later.
Financed replacement. For the homeowner who knows the roof is 22 years old and has been putting it off. The offer is not "roof replacement", it is a monthly number. "Most of our replacements finance between $180 and $320 a month with approved credit." Run it year round to homeowners 35 and up in your service zips.
Retargeting. Anyone who watched 50% of a video, visited the site, or opened a lead form and did not finish. This is the cheapest inventory in the account and it is where the drone footage earns its keep.
Creative: what a roof ad should look like
The winning format in this trade is video shot on a phone, not a produced commercial.
The single best performer is drone footage of a real roof with the owner or the inspector narrating what is wrong with it. Thirty to sixty seconds. "This is a roof in the Cedar Ridge neighborhood we looked at Tuesday. You can see the hail bruising on the south slope here, and this is what a lifted ridge cap looks like. The homeowner had no idea. That is why the inspection is free." Captions burned in, because most of it is watched with sound off.
Second best: tear-off timelapse. A crew stripping and replacing a roof compressed into 20 seconds is genuinely satisfying to watch and it proves you own crews.
Third: before and after stills in a carousel, same address, same angle, city named in the caption.
What does not work: stock photos of houses, a logo on a colored background, a photo of your truck alone, or anything that looks like a graphic designer made it. Meta rewards the format the platform already looks like.
Refresh creative every three to four weeks. Roofing audiences are geographically small, frequency climbs quickly, and a fatigued ad in a single zip code goes from $30 leads to $90 leads inside a fortnight.
The offer
Free roof inspection is the baseline and it works. Improve it by making it specific and time-bound.
"Free 20-minute drone roof inspection with a photo report, booking this week for the Willow Creek and Sundance neighborhoods."
For financed retail, lead with the payment. For storm, lead with the inspection and the tarp. Never lead with a discount off a roof price, because homeowners do not know what a roof costs and a percentage off an unknown number means nothing.
Do not advertise anything about deductibles, claim approval, or paying the homeowner's out-of-pocket. Beyond being against Meta's policies, in most states it is illegal for a contractor. The safe and legal boundaries are laid out in the Google Ads guide and they apply identically here.
Lead forms versus sending them to the site
Use Meta's instant lead forms for storm campaigns. Speed matters more than qualification when the neighborhood is being canvassed by six companies, and an instant form on a phone converts several times better than a landing page.
Use a landing page for financed retail, where you want the homeowner to see the finance terms, the license number and the job photos before she raises her hand. That page is described in the website guide.
Either way the lead has to reach a human within five minutes. A Meta lead is 21 times more likely to be worked successfully when it is called immediately versus 30 minutes later, and in roofing it is worse than that because the next contractor is knocking the door in person.
Targeting and budget
Keep the audience simple. Homeowners, ages 35 to 70, in the zip codes you serve. Add homeowner and home value behaviors where they are still available in your account. Do not layer six interests on top; a roofing audience in one metro is small enough already and over-targeting starves the algorithm.
Budget guidance:
- Storm response: $100 to $300 a day for two to three weeks, aimed at the affected zips. This is the highest-return spend in roofing when it is fast.
- Financed retail: $40 to $80 a day, running continuously.
- Retargeting: $10 to $20 a day. It will produce the lowest cost per lead in the account and it should never be turned off.
At the low end that is roughly $1,500 to $3,000 a month for the always-on portion, which at $50 a lead is 30 to 60 inspection requests.
Measuring it honestly
Meta will report leads. Leads are not the metric. Track set inspections, inspections that happened, and signed contracts, tagged by campaign, in your CRM. A campaign at $28 per lead where nobody is home for the inspection is worse than one at $70 per lead that books.
Give it 30 days and at least 50 leads before you judge a campaign. Roofing takes weeks to close, so month one numbers always understate the account. See the benchmark report for what the rest of the trade looks like while you wait.
Frequently asked
Should I boost posts instead? No. Boosting gives you almost no control over placement, audience or optimization event. It is the most expensive way to buy the least useful traffic.
Do I need a Facebook page with followers? You need a page that looks alive: profile photo, cover, twenty recent posts of real jobs. Follower count is irrelevant to ad delivery, but a page with three posts from 2021 makes people bounce before they click.
Can I run the same storm ad in every metro? No. Name the neighborhood. The whole reason storm creative works is that the homeowner recognizes the street.
Meta ads for roofing are one of the services in the free 14-day trial: built, launched and reported on, with no card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.