Vander Els Partners
Enough to buy a sample big enough to learn from, and no more than the jobs it produces are worth. Both halves of that are numbers you already have. Nobody else's average will do, because the click cost in your market and the close rate of your crew are not the average.
Work it from the job, not from the budget
Start at the end. A replacement roof is worth a certain amount to you after materials and labour. You know that figure better than any agency does.
Then work backwards through your own numbers.
- Of the people who call, how many become an estimate?
- Of the estimates, how many become a job?
- So how many calls does one job cost you?
Now you know what a call is worth. That is your ceiling. A call that costs more than that is a call you are paying to lose money on, and no amount of volume fixes it.
What a click costs is not up to you
Roofing clicks are expensive in most markets because every roofer in the area is bidding on the same handful of searches after every storm. The price is set by the auction, not by your budget. What you control is which searches you show up for. A campaign that refuses to bid on "free roof estimate," "roof repair DIY" and the county you do not serve spends the same money on fewer, better clicks.
The sample problem
Below a certain spend, paid search stops producing information. Ten clicks tell you nothing. You cannot see which search terms work, which ad works, which town works, so you cannot improve anything, and the account sits there being expensive without being useful. That is the failure mode of a thin budget. It does not fail loudly enough to cancel.
So the right spend is the smallest amount that produces enough calls each month to see a pattern, and the largest amount that still costs less per call than a call is worth to you. Those two numbers bracket the answer, and in a market that cannot fit a budget between them, the honest answer is that paid search is not the right first move there.
The short version
Spend is derived from the value of a job and the cost of a click in your market. The first is yours. The second is measured, not guessed. Put your own numbers in, and you will know.