How We Beat the Forecast Cost Per Lead by 27% in Commercial Roofing
against a $108-270 forecast
above the trades benchmark
from $1,500 in ad spend
The Challenge
SH Metal Roofing wanted commercial work — re-roofing contracts worth $50K to $500K, and re-screw and cyclone-prep jobs from $5K to $50K. The kind of jobs that come from builders, project managers and commercial property owners, not homeowners.
Two things stood in the way. Their website still presented them as the one-man residential outfit they had started as, rather than the team they had become. And the market itself is small — in Cairns, only a handful of people search for commercial roofing in any given week. Every wasted click costs real money, and a residential enquiry, however friendly, is a wasted click when you are chasing commercial contracts.
Our own research put the realistic cost per lead at $108 to $270. That was the number to beat, on a modest budget, in a market with almost no search volume to spare.
The Solution
First the site had to match the work they were going after. Then the ads had to stop paying for the wrong clicks. In a thin market you do not win by bidding harder — you win by refusing to pay for traffic you cannot convert.
Repositioned for commercial buyers
A new site built around commercial capability rather than residential jobs — clear service breakdowns, project galleries showing large-scale work, licensing and safety credentials, and copy written for builders and project managers. The enquiry form asks for project type, scope and timeline, which filters small residential requests before they reach the inbox.
Four tightly themed ad groups
Rather than one broad campaign, we split the account into commercial re-roofing, re-screws and cyclone prep, commercial roof repair, and general commercial roofing — each with its own keywords and its own ads. Tight themes mean the ad always matches the search, which lifts relevance and lowers what each click costs.
100 negative keywords before launch
We blocked residential, DIY, materials-only and job-seeker searches from day one instead of discovering them in the reports later. On a small budget, the money you do not spend on the wrong clicks matters more than the money you do spend.
Scheduling and radius built around commercial buyers
Ads run Monday to Friday 6am-6pm and Saturday mornings at a reduced bid, within a 70km radius of Cairns. Builders and project managers search during work hours. Sundays were switched off entirely — no point paying for browsing traffic on a day nobody awards contracts.
Conversion tracking that separates real enquiries
Form submissions and phone clicks are tracked as distinct conversions with different values, so we optimise toward genuine commercial enquiries rather than raw traffic. Every reported lead is a tracked action, not an estimate.
The Results
against a $108-270 forecast
above the trades benchmark
from $1,500 in ad spend
Across the campaign, $1,500 in ad spend produced 19 tracked leads at $79 each — 27% below the bottom of our own $108-270 forecast, and roughly 70% below the top of it.
The supporting numbers hold up: a 7.4% click-through rate against a typical trades benchmark of 4-6%, and 6.4% of clicks converting into enquiries. The best-performing ad group, re-screws and cyclone prep, reached 13.38% CTR — evidence that specific, well-matched ads beat broad ones in a narrow market.
For a commercial roofing business, one won contract can be worth $50,000 or more. At $79 a lead, the campaign pays for itself many times over on a single job.
“I went from invisible online to getting calls from people who found me on Google — and I haven't spent a cent on ads. The website just works.
Vision Painting
Vision Painting
to first organic leads
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