Which Searches Are Actually Worth Bidding On
Thunder Bay is a smaller, tighter market than the GTA, which cuts both ways. Fewer competitors means your ads don't get buried on page two, but the total search volume is also lower, so wasting spend on the wrong keyword hurts more here than it would in a bigger city with more room for error.
Not every roofing-related search deserves a dollar of spend. “Roofing companies Thunder Bay” and “roof repair Thunder Bay” carry clear commercial intent; someone typing that has a problem and a wallet open. “How to fix a roof leak” does not; that's a DIY searcher, and bidding on it burns clicks from people who were never going to hire anyone.
Build your roofing Google Ads campaign around three tiers:
- High-intent branded-adjacent terms: “emergency roof repair Thunder Bay,” “roof replacement cost Thunder Bay” these searchers are close to calling someone today.
- Service-specific terms: “metal roofing Thunder Bay,” “flat roof repair,” “shingle roof replacement”, narrower audience, but they know exactly what they want, which makes the sales call shorter.
- Seasonal spikes: storm damage and ice-dam searches jump hard right after a weather event. A campaign with a paused “storm damage” ad group ready to switch on beats scrambling to write copy while the phone is already ringing.
Skip generic head terms like “roofing” alone, in a market Thunder Bay's size, that keyword is expensive and mostly wasted on browsers, not buyers.
Building a Campaign That Doesn't Bleed Money
Start with Search campaigns only, Performance Max and Display can come later. Search ads reach people actively typing “roof repair” or “roofing company” into Google right now; Performance Max and Display spend most of their budget getting your ad in front of people who are just browsing, which is a poor trade in a market Thunder Bay's size where every dollar needs to earn its keep.
Set a daily budget you can actually sustain for 30 days before judging results, pausing after four days because “it's not working yet” is the single most common way roofing companies waste their first month of ad spend. Google Ads needs a real data set before its own optimization even starts working properly.
Negative keywords matter more here than almost anywhere else. Add “jobs,” “hiring,” “DIY,” “how to,” and “free” as negatives from day one, without them, a chunk of your budget goes to job seekers and homeowners who were never going to pay for a crew. Ontario's Building Code Act and municipal permitting rules mean a real percentage of “roof repair” searches are also just people checking whether they need a permit: worth excluding if your ad copy and landing page don't address that question directly.
Landing Pages and Tracking: Where Most Campaigns Actually Fail
A roofing company running Google Ads that all point at the homepage is leaving money on the table before the phone even rings. Build one landing page per service tier, a “roof repair” page for repair searches, a separate “roof replacement” page for replacement searches, each with a headline that matches the ad, a phone number above the fold, and a form that asks three questions, not fifteen.
Say a roofing company in Thunder Bay is bidding on “emergency roof repair Thunder Bay” but sending every click to a generic homepage listing five services. The visitor has to hunt for the phone number, decide the company even does emergency work, and often just leaves. Match the landing page to the exact search and that same click converts at a noticeably higher rate, no extra ad spend required, just a page built for the one thing the searcher actually wants.
Call tracking is not optional here. Roofing leads come in by phone far more than by form, and without a tracked number tied to the campaign, you're guessing which keyword actually produced the job rather than knowing.
Mistakes That Burn Roofing Ad Budgets in Thunder Bay
A few patterns show up again and again:
- Bidding on the whole city with no radius limit. A Thunder Bay roofer bidding on searches from Nipigon or Marathon pays for clicks from homeowners outside a reasonable drive.
- One ad group for every service. “Roofing Thunder Bay” covering repair, replacement, and inspection in a single ad group means the ad copy can't speak to any of them specifically.
- No conversion tracking set up before launch. Without it, the second month's budget decisions are guesswork instead of data.
- Turning campaigns off too early. Search campaigns typically need real time and data to hit their stride, judging performance in the first week almost always looks worse than month two.
Fix these and most Thunder Bay roofing companies see a real shift in cost per lead before spending a dollar more.
