Adam Sand breaks down why roofing leads don't convert to appointments: slow response times, targeting the wrong zip codes, weak landing pages, and form friction. He shows the math of cost-per-lead and cost-per-appointment, then explains how ad spend should be about 5% of target revenue to hit a 20× return.
You can build a successful roofing company when you can predictably have the input of ad dollars and the output of sales, because then everything else is controlled in the middle of that. You spend $1,000, you get 1,000 leads, but only 1 in 10 of those book an appointment. So you get 100 appointments for $1,000. You're paying $10 per appointment, but then if you close at 25%, well, then you're going to get 25 sales. 25 sales times $20,000 is going to be like, what, $1 million or something like that, right? You're getting great return. So it's about to investigate where is this falling apart? So then you say, oh, our lead to appointment rate sucks. Why is that? Well, let's go look. We had 369 leads, but 61 of them are still sitting in lead status in my HubSpot. Why is that? They never booked an appointment. Well, let's pull those 61 leads and I'll look at the response time. Let's look at the zip code. We paid for 61 leads that never booked. Why is that? Ah, we're advertising too far outside of our service area. And when we call, we call from an area code that's obviously for New Jersey and they're in like the Bronx or something. We have to diagnose why is it that only 1 in 10 people are clicking and then not converting on our website. Something on the website made them feel like this isn't for them, or there wasn't any kind of urgency, opportunity, or scarcity that told them that now's the time that they should not leave this website without at least giving you the opportunity. So where are we wasting ad dollars showing people ads that aren't getting clicked on? Now, if they're getting clicked on, where are they going? Why are they not choosing to convert into a contact? Is it the offer? Is it the landing page? Is it the form? Is it the audience that we're targeting is not relevant, too far away? If you're targeting a wide area like all of New York, is that outside your service area? Some people are saying, oh, you know what, that roofing company is not for me. They're too far away. You could be saying, oh, well, we're targeting them for roofers in my area, but we have no offer. We have nothing that's causing them to convert. We're getting site visits. So then you say, oh, our cost per click is $70 a click, but we're getting 1 in 10 people are converting and that's causing us to get a $700 cost per conversion, cost per lead. So when you calculate ROAS, you know, let's say I want to invest $100,000 in marketing. What's the return? Is it the profit margin? $2 million of sales. Yeah. Which you should be generating a $200,000 net profit minimum. You want your ROAS to, yes, fit into net profit, but the idea is is that your ad spend is targeting roughly 5% of desired revenue. So if you're saying, oh, I want to do $2 million in sales, it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to spend $100,000 on ads, which means you're going to spend $8,000-something on ad spend every single month. Right. And then in theory, by hiring a marketing agency instead of doing it yourself, you should get a better output from that $8,000 than if you were to do it yourself because you're paying for expertise and management. If you look at $100,000 in spend, Well, then you would say, okay, well, I need to make $2 million in revenue. So one could say, oh, we're getting a 20x ROAS. But then some people might say, oh, that's insane. So then you might say, oh, well, I'm going to go and ad spend to net profit. But the problem is net profit, there's so many things that can impact net profit. You might get a false positive or a false negative in terms of how you're determining the return on your ad spend, because there's 30 things that affect net profit. So it's just a matter of like being honest with yourself about it. Because you might say, oh, my marketing agency sucks because I spent $100,000 on ads and I only got $100,000 in net profit. But maybe you sold $4 million worth of roofs for that $100,000 in ad spend. And the reason that your net profit was only 100 grand is because of 19 other things that are bad and has nothing to do with your ad spend. So then you would be getting a false negative in terms of the effectiveness of your ad spend because your ad spend was 2.5% of revenue. You just take the number that you were spending on ads, or you're budgeting to spend on ads, and multiply that number by 20.
