Performance Max now takes negative keywords. What a roofer should block first.
Google lets you add negative keywords to Performance Max campaigns. The searches that quietly drain a roofing budget and the list to add before winter.
If you run Performance Max for your roofing company, you have probably paid for clicks from people looking for roofing jobs, shingle prices at the big box store, or how to patch a leak themselves. For a long time there was very little you could do about it inside the campaign.
That changed. Google now lets advertisers add negative keywords directly to Performance Max campaigns, and it has been adding more search term reporting too. For a roofer, this is the most useful Google Ads change in a while, because the searches that waste money in this trade are predictable.
Why this matters more for roofers than most trades
Roofing clicks are expensive. In many metros a single click on "roof replacement" runs anywhere from $20 to $80, and a qualified lead can cost a few hundred dollars. When one click in five goes to someone who wants a job application or a DIY video, that is real money every week.
Performance Max was always hard to control. It spreads your budget across Search, Maps, YouTube, Display and Gmail, and it decides where to show. You could add brand exclusions and account-level negatives, but campaign-level control was thin. Now you can tell a specific campaign, in plain words, which searches you do not want.
The first list to add
Here is a starting list. Add these as phrase match negatives and adjust to your market.
Jobs and training. roofing jobs, roofer jobs, roofing hiring, roofing apprentice, roofing salary, roofing school, roofer license class.
Do it yourself. how to, diy, tutorial, youtube, patch kit, roof sealant, tar, video.
Materials shopping. home depot, lowes, menards, shingles for sale, bundle price, metal roofing panels, roofing nails, underlayment.
Wrong service. roof rack, car roof, rv roof, roof top tent, shed kit, gutter guard installation if you do not install them.
Wrong type of customer. If you do not do commercial flat roofs, block tpo, epdm and commercial. If you do not take insurance work, think hard before blocking insurance terms, because a lot of good homeowners search that way after a storm.
Do not overdo it. Negatives that are too broad block real buyers. "Cost" is a good example. People who search "roof replacement cost" are often close to calling. Leave it alone.
How to find the rest of your list
Open the campaign's search term insights once a week for the next month. Sort by cost. Look for patterns, not single searches. If you see five versions of "roofing company near me hiring," add "hiring." If you see a competitor's name getting clicks you do not want to pay for, decide whether conquesting them is worth it.
The Google Ads guide covers campaign structure in more depth, including why many roofers do better with a plain Search campaign alongside Performance Max, not instead of it.
What not to expect
Negative keywords stop waste. They do not create leads. If your campaign is not producing calls at all, the problem is usually further down the line: the landing page, the phone, or the follow-up.
Look at the phone first. A roofer who spends $3,000 a month on ads and misses a third of the calls has a missed-call problem, not a keyword problem. The calculator will show what those missed calls cost at your average job size, and the missed calls and follow-up guide walks through the text-back setup.
Then look at your profile. Performance Max leans on your Google Business Profile for Maps placements. Across the 102,385 roofing listings in our data, 27.2% have no hours listed, and the median company has 13 reviews. A profile that is thin on reviews and missing hours makes every paid click harder to convert. The full picture is on the benchmarks page.
A 20-minute task for this week
- Open each Performance Max campaign and find the negative keyword setting.
- Paste in the starting list above, trimmed for the services you actually sell.
- Pull the search terms report for the last 90 days and add any obvious waste.
- Put a reminder on your calendar to check search terms every Monday through November.
- Write down your cost per lead today so you can compare in four weeks.
Winter is when many roofers cut ad spend. If you are going to keep running, this is the cheapest way to make the same budget go further while clicks are cheaper and competitors are pulling back.
If you would like any one service handled for you, the free 14-day trial needs no card. See the free trial page or text or call (385) 475-4642.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, roofing companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor