Facebook ads for roofing companies

Start with who lives under a failing roof, because for this trade that nearly settles the platform on its own — and the deciding row is one no other page in this cluster leans on. An asphalt roof reaches the end of its life at around twenty years, and the household most likely to be living under a twenty-year-old roof is the household that has been in the house twenty years. Pew's November 2025 survey puts Facebook at 74% of 50- to 64-year-olds and 57% of over-65s, against Instagram's 40% and 19%. On the band that actually owns the roofs that fail, Facebook has roughly three times Instagram's reach, and the gap widens the older the roof gets. The 30–49 row still matters — 80% against 62% — but it is the 65+ row that makes this an easy platform decision rather than a close one.

Now the thing this trade has that none of the others do, and it is not a platform feature. Your real competitor is not another advertiser in the auction. It is a person standing on the homeowner's porch seventy-two hours after the hail, with a clipboard, an out-of-state plate and an offer to handle everything. No bid wins against a doorbell, and no amount of budget puts you in the driveway first. So a large part of what Facebook is buying in roofing is memory: being the company the household has already heard of when somebody unfamiliar knocks. That is a genuine Awareness case argued from an adversary rather than from a season, and it is why the letter-from-the-owner ad in the set below is bought as Awareness and judged on whether the calls that arrive later mention the permit.

Third, the surfaces, and the emergency one is worth more here than the reporting suggests. Facebook has nine image placements against Instagram's four — Feed, in-stream video, video feeds, Marketplace, Stories, ads on Reels, search results, Business Explore and the right-hand column. Call ads are mobile-only and deliver on Facebook Feed, Marketplace, Reels and Video feed as well as the two Instagram surfaces, so four of the six places that can ring a dispatch line are Facebook inventory and two have no Instagram equivalent. The reporting separates calls placed from 20-second calls and 60-second calls, and for emergency tarping the 60-second number is the only one that behaves like a job. Note the difference from heating work: an HVAC emergency call comes in during the day from a house that is 96°F, and a roofing one comes in at six in the evening from somebody looking at bare deck with rain forecast overnight. Staff the hours you advertise or do not advertise them.

Fourth, shape, and this batch produced the clearest evidence in the cluster on it. Meta's ads guide recommends 4:5 at 1440 × 1800 for Facebook Feed and that is where most of the budget delivers, but 1.91:1 routes to the right-hand column and search results, which have no Instagram position at all. Buy the wide slot for a drawing rather than a photograph: a diagram has nothing in its top and bottom margins to lose in a wide crop. The batch on the examples page re-framed all ten exports off a square draft, and exactly one came back padded — the founder's letter, a 1.91:1 photograph of a desk, with about sixty-five rows of flat cream top and bottom. That is the fourth occurrence of the defect in this cluster and all four have been photographs. But the same run re-framed a photograph square to 9:16, the most aggressive crop in the corpus, and it came back full-bleed. So the rule is not "photographs crop badly" — it is that when it happens it happens to a photograph, and a drawing has never been the casualty.

Fifth, Meta does have one standard aimed squarely at this category, and it constrains the moment you most want to advertise into. The advertising standard on commercial exploitation of crises and controversial events says ads "must not contain content that exploits crises or controversial events for commercial purposes", defines those as events "that are the subject of significant public attention", names natural disasters as an example, and prohibits both promoting content related to a crisis for commercial benefit and offering crisis-related products for sale. Roofing's entire demand curve is a natural disaster. The policy does not draw the line for you, so draw it yourself: a tarp, a phone number and an arrival window is a service offered to people who have been through a storm; a named hurricane, a news photograph and a countdown is advertising the storm. That distinction runs through the creative and through the ad set — a campaign whose targeting is built on a named disaster is making the argument the policy is about, whatever the picture shows.

Finally, what Facebook is not for in this trade, because it explains why the Instagram case here is a different business rather than the same ads reformatted. Roofing's native visual is the before-and-after, and the honest problem with it is that every finished asphalt roof looks like every other finished asphalt roof — the "after" proves nothing a drone shot of a competitor's work would not also prove. The version that carries real information is the one where the "before" is the bare deck with the rotten sheathing cut out, and that is a documentation argument rather than a beauty one. It reads as craft on a visual platform and as evidence on this one. This page is about the claim, the tear-off, the spec and the financed replacement. The photogenic half of the trade is a different argument.

Ads Manager offers six objectives — Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales — and a roofing company has a real use for three. Sales is a no, as it is on the dentist and real-estate pages, but roofing states the case more plainly than either: there is no class pack, no maintenance plan, no shirt, and nothing at all a homeowner buys without somebody climbing a ladder first. The batch on the examples page split five Leads, four Traffic and one Awareness, with no Sales ad in it at all. That was not an oversight in the brief — a split with a Sales line in it would be describing a different business.

Leads is the default and takes most of the budget, because every transaction in the trade starts with an inspection. Traffic is a strong second and unusually strong for a local service, because half of what a roofer sells is a specification the homeowner has never heard of: a nailing pattern, a layover, an ice-and-water membrane, the difference between a manufacturer's system warranty and a contractor's promise. Asking for the appointment before explaining any of that is asking too early, and the click is cheaper than the lead.

Awareness is the interesting one, and the argument for it here is not the one the other local trades make. A heating contractor buys Awareness because demand is event-triggered and being remembered in January is the product; a dental practice buys it because the decision is deferred for years. A roofer buys it because a competitor will physically be at the door within three days of the hail and the only defence is having been heard of first. Same objective, an adversary rather than a delay, and it changes what the creative should be: not an offer, but a reason to distrust the offer somebody else is about to make in person.

This is where a roofing account is won or lost, and the losing version is easy to describe because almost everybody runs it: one free-inspection ad, pointed at everybody, all year. That ad is competing with every other roofer's identical ad and with a man on the porch, it says nothing, and it collects the cheapest possible lead — somebody who wanted a free thing. The offers below span a $340 tarp and a five-figure replacement, and the person whose deck is open tonight is not weighing the same question as the person holding three quotes that all say twenty-five years.

Each row pins four decisions: who the offer is actually for, which angle family argues it best — every one is a page in the angle library — which objective buys it, and, where the examples page has one, a finished ad showing the whole thing assembled. Twelve rows is not a campaign plan. Pick two or three that match what your crews are short of this month and let the weather pick the rest.

Two notes on the table before you use it. First, Identity and Emotion is on this page, which it is not on the HVAC guide, and the difference is a rule rather than a preference. The HVAC batch briefed a $249 damper and its emotional angle still rendered "Stop tiptoeing down that hallway to check on her" — second person, telling the reader a fact about their own household, which is what Meta's personal attributes policy prohibits. The roofing batch kept the same family and the same sub-angle and moved one variable: it framed the audience by something they did rather than something they are, people who bought a 1970s house last April. The result has no people in the frame and copy that is emotional without asserting anything — "You bought the house. You didn't buy the anxiety that comes with every weather alert." Define the audience by a decision rather than a demographic and the angle stops reaching for the attribute.

Second, the family that is not represented by an ad on the examples page is the trade's most obvious one, and that is deliberate. Before and after sits under Proof and Trust, and it is what roofing advertising is mostly made of. The honest problem is that every finished asphalt roof looks like every other finished asphalt roof, so a slider between a tired roof and a new one proves nothing that a stock photograph would not also prove. The version with information in it puts the bare deck in the middle — rot cut out, sheathing numbered, photographed before anything went back over it. That is the tear-off row below, and it is a documentation argument wearing a before-and-after's clothes.

Start from the declaration, because it is compulsory and because getting it wrong is the most expensive mistake available in this account. Since 31 March 2020 every campaign created through Meta's Marketing API must specify a special ad category — including from businesses that offer none of housing, employment or credit, whose answer is simply NONE. Meta accepts four values and roofing is not one of them. So for an inspection, a tarp call-out, a tear-off quote or a certification, a roofing contractor keeps every lever: age, a radius smaller than fifteen miles, ZIP codes, lookalikes, saved audiences, exclusions, the lot. The radius floor in ordinary use is 0.63 miles, or 1 kilometre.

Now the lever this trade lives on, which no other guide in this cluster has had to write about. Hail falls in a swath. It is a few miles wide, it has an edge you can drive across, and a mile off it there is no damage at all — which means the useful targeting object after a storm is not a radius around your depot, it is a list of postcodes the hail actually crossed. Storm reports give you that list within a day. Nothing else in local advertising is this precise or this perishable, and it is the entire reason a roofing account can outperform its budget: you are not advertising to a city, you are advertising to a stripe across it.

Which sets up the sentence this page turns on. The category attaches to what an ad offers, not to what a company sells — Meta's own scope is ads that "offer housing, employment, or credit opportunities" — so a roofing company is not in a category and a roofing advertisement can be. Advertise a replacement on a fixed monthly payment and that campaign is a financial products and services campaign, required for US advertisers since January 2025 (the reference page gives 14 January in its banner and 21 January in its milestones and disagrees with itself; treat it as live). The API value is FINANCIAL_PRODUCTS_SERVICES. CREDIT was replaced on that date and any runbook still naming it has not been touched in over a year.

What the category costs, in full, because the trade press does not print it. Location exclusion is unsupported. ZIP codes, neighbourhoods, sub-city, sub-neighbourhood, metro area, small geographic area and electoral district are all unsupported as location types. The radius floor becomes 15 miles or 25 kilometres in the US and Canada, 15 kilometres in Europe. Age fixes to 18–65+ and gender goes to all. Lookalike and saved audiences are removed, and detailed targeting loses behaviour and demographic targeting, interest exclusion and detailed-targeting exclusion, with surviving interests limited to a previously approved list. Read the second item on that list against the paragraph before it: the financed campaign cannot name the swath. For a housing advertiser that restriction is an inconvenience, for a heating contractor it is a drive time, and for a roofer it deletes the strategy.

Two things survive and both are underused. Custom Audiences survive in full — inclusion, exclusion and expansion — as do Advantage+ Audience and Detailed Targeting Expansion, and a list can be checked for eligibility ahead of a campaign with the is_eligible_for_sac_campaigns flag rather than discovered at launch. That makes your own data the only precision instrument left inside a declared campaign, and in roofing the valuable list is not the customer list. A roof is bought twice in a lifetime, so past customers are mostly an exclusion and a referral audience. The asset worth maintaining is everyone you inspected and did not sign: they have a roof you have personally been on, a written finding, and a decision they have already started making. Most roofing companies have that list in a folder and have never uploaded it.

The practical resolution is the structural sibling of the ones this cluster found elsewhere — real estate qualifies on a property event rather than a person, apparel on the garment rather than the body, HVAC splits the campaign rather than the message. Roofing splits it harder, because the two halves cannot share a targeting strategy at all. Financing runs in its own declared campaign at a wide radius and accepts that it is buying a county. Storm work, inspections, tear-offs and certifications stay in ordinary campaigns where the ZIP list still works. What you must never do is let a finance line drift into the storm campaign — one sentence about monthly payments recategorises the campaign it sits in, and the postcodes go with it.

One more thing before the table, because it fails as a hard error rather than as poor delivery. A business admin has to accept Meta's non-discrimination policy in Business Settings before a housing, employment or financial campaign will deliver at all: the API returns error 2859024, "Certification Required". Its neighbour 2909035 comes back for a custom age range, a saved audience, a lookalike, or a radius under the floor. If a financing campaign will not launch, read those two codes before touching the creative.

Three real answers, and unusually the split is not by price — it is by how much of the offer is a legal question.

Emergency tarping is a phone call and it is not close. Somebody looking at bare deck with rain forecast in four hours does not want a form and a form does not want them. Run call ads: mobile-only, delivering on Facebook Feed, Marketplace, Reels and Video feed as well as the Instagram surfaces, and reported in a way nothing else on this platform is — calls placed, 20-second calls and 60-second calls, separately. Optimise and judge on the 60-second number. And daypart it to the hours somebody actually answers, which needs a lifetime budget, because the demand here is evening and overnight and an emergency ad that reaches voicemail at eight at night is the most expensive thing in this guide.

Inspections, tear-off quotes and certifications suit an Instant Form, and the type matters. Meta gives you two: "More volume" is built to be filled and submitted in one thumb movement from pre-filled profile data, and "Higher intent" adds a review step. The pre-filled version is what makes the first one cheap and what makes it useless in this trade — a free-inspection lead who never looked at what they submitted does not remember you when you ring back, and after a storm you are ringing back into a queue of people who have been called by six companies. Use Higher intent, add two or three qualifying questions — age of roof, own or rent, storm date if there was one — and accept the volume drop. Lead ads can also open a conversation on Messenger or WhatsApp, and the "Instant forms and Messenger" conversion location runs one campaign and lets delivery choose per person, which is worth testing if your office already books by message.

Anything touching an insurance claim gets a landing page, and this is the one place in the cluster where the destination choice is a compliance decision rather than a conversion one. The claim offer needs room to explain a deductible correctly, and — this is the part people miss — a landing page is advertising too. The statutes that make "we'll handle your claim" prohibited do not stop at the ad unit; a page that says it is making the same representation with more words. So the page carries the same four-word discipline as the ad: document, meet, invoice, never negotiate. Financing also gets a page, as an obligation rather than a preference: the ad's whole promise is that the rate, term and total survive the click, and a landing page that reverts to "as low as" language undoes the ad and the disclosure it was carrying. Never the homepage — somebody who tapped an ad about a nailing pattern and lands on a rotating hero of a drone shot has been asked to start over.

Lead with the two sentences, because they are the reason this section is different from every other one on this site. The first is the deductible. In Texas, Bus. & Com. Code § 27.02(c) makes it an offence — a Class B misdemeanour — for a seller expecting payment from property insurance proceeds to advertise or promise to pay, waive, absorb, rebate or credit the insured's deductible, and § 27.02(b) requires any such contract of $1,000 or more to carry a 12-point boldface notice beginning "Texas law requires a person insured under a property insurance policy to pay any deductible applicable to a claim made under the policy." Minnesota gets there differently: § 325E.66 subd. 1(a)(1) bars a residential contractor from advertising or promising to pay any part of an applicable deductible as an inducement, subd. 1(c) includes residential roofers in the definition, and subd. 2 gives both the insured and the insurer an action for damages. The prohibition is not only on doing it. The verb in both statutes is advertise.

The second sentence is the one almost nobody treats as a legal question, and it appears in more roofing ads than the first. Tex. Ins. Code § 4102.163(a): "A contractor may not act as a public adjuster or advertise to adjust claims for any property for which the contractor is providing or may provide contracting services, regardless of whether the contractor: (1) holds a license under this chapter; or (2) is authorized to act on behalf of the insured under a power of attorney or other agreement." The Texas Department of Insurance puts it plainly for advertisers: offering to negotiate a claim settlement or to file a claim for the policyholder is prohibited conduct for the contractor doing the work. Minnesota's § 325E.66 subd. 1(a)(3) bars that same contractor from interpreting policy provisions, advising on coverages or adjusting a claim without a chapter 72B public adjuster licence. So "we'll deal with your insurance company" — the trade's most-run line — is, where those statutes apply, a description of prohibited conduct rather than a service promise.

The compliant version of the service is four words long and it is the most useful thing on this page: document, meet, invoice. "We photograph the damage, we are on the roof when your adjuster is, and we invoice your carrier directly" describes exactly the same work, asserts nothing about what a policy pays, and claims to act for nobody. Then check the description line, because that is where the violation hides in the fewest words. The claim ad on the examples page is the demonstration: briefed neutrally, it attacked deductible waiving by name — the rendered card says anyone offering to make your deductible disappear "is committing insurance fraud, and it's your name on the claim" — and then promised to "file supplements if anything gets missed", stated flatly that "your carrier covers everything else at replacement-cost value", and signed off "Your deductible. We handle the rest." That is filing with a carrier on the insured's behalf and interpreting a policy provision, in an ad whose author clearly knew the famous rule and had never heard of this one. Meta approved it.

Third, the storm itself, which is a Meta rule and it constrains framing rather than wording. The advertising standard on commercial exploitation of crises prohibits content that exploits crises for commercial purposes, names natural disasters as an example, and covers both promoting crisis-related content for commercial benefit and offering crisis-related products for sale. Advertise the service, not the storm: a tarp, an arrival window and a price is the defensible side; a named event, a news photograph of the damage and a countdown is not. The line runs through the ad set as well as the creative, because a campaign built around a named disaster is making the argument the policy is about even if the picture is only a van.

Fourth, money, and this is the HVAC rule arriving in a trade that also finances. Regulation Z, 12 CFR 1026.24(d), makes four things triggering terms: the amount or percentage of any downpayment, the number of payments or period of repayment, the amount of any payment, and the amount of any finance charge. State one and the advertisement owes the reader the downpayment, the repayment terms over the full term of the loan including any balloon payment, and the annual percentage rate using that phrase. Subsection (c) requires any stated rate of finance charge to be given as an APR using that term, and subsection (a) limits an ad to terms actually available. "New roof from $99/month" states the amount of a payment and nothing else, which is the exact shape the rule was written about. Your finance partner has approved language for this, because this rule is why they have a compliance function.

Fifth, numbers rendered into pictures, where this batch produced the cluster's sharpest finding. The nailing ad — an ad whose entire argument is four nails against six — captions a panel FOUR NAILS, ABOVE THE LINE and draws five, captions the other THE SIX-NAIL STANDARD and draws seven, while getting every part of the mechanism right. Two ads away, the inspection ad promises five reasons and renders exactly five numbered rows. So the rule is not that quantities come out wrong: a count set in type is reliable and a count of drawn objects is not. If the number is the argument, keep it in the headline and the body copy and let the picture carry the mechanism. The same batch computed £118.39 × 120 = £14,206.80 and £198.23 × 60 = £11,893.80 exactly, both implying the same 7.90% nominal rate on the quoted principal, and footed an eleven-line handwritten estimate to exactly $9,260.00 inside a photograph. This pipeline computes well and enumerates badly.

Sixth, and this is what makes the length rules below binding rather than advisory: you cannot see the frame your ad will be shown in. Facebook Feed wants 4:5 at 1440 × 1800, 50–150 characters of primary text and a 27-character headline, and shows no description line at all. Marketplace wants a square at 1080 × 1080, 125 characters, a 40-character headline and a 30-character description. With Advantage+ placements on, one export and one headline fill all nine surfaces. This run wrote fifty headlines: two fit 27 and forty-six fit 40, and of the ten lead headlines exactly one fits Facebook's own recommendation while nine fit Instagram's. None of the fifty primary texts fits 150 — they run 248 to 568 characters. Across all seven Facebook batches now measured, 23 of 350 headlines fit 27 and 329 fit 40, and not one of 350 primary texts fits 150, the shortest ever written being 200 characters. Longer is not forbidden, it is truncated, which means the argument has to survive inside its first sentence.

And it is worth reading the two that fit, because they are both from the same ad and they sharpen a rule this cluster has been building for three batches. "Covered in 2 hrs 40 min." is 24 characters and "Same-Night Tarp. $340 Flat." is 27. The apparel page's version of this finding was that twenty-seven characters is room for a noun, not for a claim. Roofing's version is narrower and more useful: it is room for a number and a noun. Every headline in this batch that tried to carry an argument overran, and the two that fit are both a figure with a thing attached.

Four stages, and two of them are unusual. The storm stage exists because this trade's demand arrives as an event rather than as a curve, and the financing stage is a separate declared campaign rather than a stage at all — which is what the special ad category forces and what most accounts get wrong by trying to keep everything in one place.

Keep the structure this thin on purpose. A single-depot roofer's budget is small relative to the audience arithmetic Meta's delivery system wants, and every extra ad set divides the same evidence into thinner piles. Variation belongs at the ad level inside one ad set, and the thing that varies is the offer rather than the audience.

The third stage is where this funnel diverges most sharply from the HVAC one, and it is worth being explicit about why. A heating contractor's customer list is the crown jewel because every past customer is a maintenance plan now and a replacement in ten years. A roof is bought roughly twice in a lifetime, so past customers are mostly an exclusion and a source of referrals. The list that behaves like HVAC's customer list is the one nobody uploads: every inspection you did that never became a job. Those households have a roof you have been on, a written finding, and a decision they have already started making — and in this trade the interval between the inspection and the signature is often a year.

Do the arithmetic before you copy anybody's number. Meta's delivery system needs roughly 50 optimisation events per ad set per week to leave the learning phase; below that the ad set sits in "learning limited", which is not a penalty but is an admission that the system cannot optimise with what you are giving it. Take your own cost per lead, whatever it actually is, and multiply by 50. That is the weekly spend at which one ad set delivers with full information. Divide what you can genuinely spend by that figure and you have an honest measure of how much of Meta's optimisation you are buying — for most single-crew roofers the answer is a fraction of it, which is the reason the funnel above has four lines and not nine.

Now the thing that makes roofing different from every other trade in this cluster, and it is a collision between two facts that are each unremarkable on their own. The learning phase is measured over about a week. A hailstorm's advertising window is a few days, and the door-knockers are on the street within seventy-two hours. So the moment you most want to advertise is shorter than the time it takes an ad set to become good at advertising — and switching on a campaign the morning after the hail means spending the entire window paying for the system to learn, while somebody is ringing doorbells. HVAC's seasonality is a curve you can plan into. Roofing's is an event you cannot learn into. The account has to already be running before the weather that justifies it.

Which leaves a genuinely awkward trade-off rather than a clean answer, and it is more honest to say so. Adding the storm's ZIP list to an ad set changes its audience, and an audience change is a significant edit that restarts learning — so the tidy advice from the HVAC page, keep the ad set and swap the creative, does not fully transfer, because in this trade the targeting is itself the change. The workable version is to keep a standing storm ad set alive at a low budget across your whole territory through the quiet months, so that when hail falls you are raising a budget and swapping creative on something that has already learned rather than starting from nothing. Accept that a large enough budget increase can itself be significant, and accept the reset when the swath is worth it. What is not defensible is the common pattern: no spend at all until the storm, then everything at once, into an ad set with no history, three days after your competitor knocked on the door.

Seasonality on top of the events, and this trade has four moments rather than two. Spring is hail season across most of the country and it is when the storm budget gets used. Late summer into autumn is the sealing deadline — asphalt bonds by solar heat, so the last warm weeks are a real deadline you did not invent and the highest-intent booking window of the year. Winter is ice dams and the membrane argument, which is a teaching sell rather than an urgent one. And the whole year carries the aging-roof baseline, which is the only demand in this business that is not weather, and the only spend that reliably produces the pipeline the storm weeks convert.

The first three are the ones that are not about advertising performance at all, and they are the reason this section leads where it does. The rest are ordinary, expensive and common.