No way to tell what worked.
Leads arrived by phone, by form, and through the ad accounts, and nothing connected them. There was no honest answer to which marketing produced a customer.
Case study ยท Goshen, Indiana
The pages we built convert 20 times better than the general quote page.
Steel Master Roofing is a metal roofing contractor in Goshen, Indiana. Good reputation, no way to tell which marketing produced a customer. We rebuilt the site and installed real measurement. Here is what nine days of tracking shows, including the parts that are not flattering.
The problem
A roofing contractor flying blind.
Paying for the wrong work.
Local Services categories were wide open, so the account was buying leads for jobs Steel Master does not take.
Search presence stalled.
Real standing on brand searches, close to nothing on the searches people use when they are shopping for a metal roof and do not know who to call.
What we built
What we built for a metal roofing contractor.
Measurement came first in importance even though it shipped alongside everything else. Without it, none of the numbers further down this page would exist.
The site
- New website rebuilt on a static, mobile first stack
- Town pages for the Michiana towns served, including Goshen, Elkhart, Syracuse, La Porte, Granger, Benton Harbor and Union
- Search landing pages built around how people actually search: metal roof cost, metal roofers near me, metal shingles, standing seam
- Product pages for the panel lines
- Instant quote tool embedded, so a visitor gets a real price on their own roof without waiting for a callback
- Interactive completed project map as proof of scale
- Technical SEO: structure, indexation, redirects, schema, Search Console
The measurement and the ads
- Full measurement stack: Google Analytics, Search Console, and event tracking that counts completed forms rather than clicks
- Server side lead capture, so a lead survives ad blockers and closed tabs, with de-duplication so one lead is never counted twice
- Google Ads rebuilt around specific search themes, each pointed at a matching page rather than the homepage
- Local Services categories narrowed to stop paying for out of scope leads
- Six months of social scheduled on a page that had posted once all year
The proof asset
Every pin is a roof you can drive past.
The completed project map plots 2,083 mapped installs across Michiana. Filter by product, click a pin, and you get the color, the install year, and turn by turn directions to go look at it yourself. Coordinates carry deliberate jitter so no customer address is exposed.
This is the page that answers the question every metal roofing buyer actually has, which is whether anyone near them has one. It converts at about 1 in 115.
What it produced
Purpose built pages beat the general quote page by about 20 times.
Nine days of tracking, August 21 to August 29, 2026. A completed form counts as a lead. Phone taps, email clicks, CTA clicks, form starts and widget opens are deliberately not counted, because a tap is not a name and a number you can follow up.
- 1 in 10
The search and town pages we built
4 forms from 38 visits - 1 in 198
The general quote and contact pages
6 forms from 1,185 visits - 20
Completed forms in nine days
From 1,971 visits sitewide - 9 of 9
Independent cross check
The quote tool feed and our own tracking agreed exactly over the days both cover
Still early. Thirty eight visits and four forms is a small base, and we are presenting it as direction rather than proof. The homepage converts at 1 in 33 and the proof pages and project map at 1 in 115. Product pages have produced nothing yet. Source: Google Analytics, grouped by page role, August 21 to 29, 2026.
“Sam rebuilt our site and got it doing what we needed without me having to hold his hand through it. We can finally see where our leads are coming from.”
Where the leads came from
Including the channel that is not working.
Google ads, search
7 forms from 65 visits. About 1 in 9. The best converting channel on the account.
Free Google results
5 forms from 118 visits. About 1 in 24, and climbing week over week.
Facebook and Instagram ads
3 forms from 1,479 visits. About 1 in 493. The most traffic by a wide margin and the worst conversion on the account.
The remaining forms came from people typing the address or using a saved link, from organic social posts, and one from an AI assistant. We include the paid social row because leaving it out would make this page a sales sheet. The diagnosis there is done and the fix is in progress. It is not a win yet.
Search is compounding
Free search traffic has roughly tripled in six weeks.
- 30 → 97
Weekly visits from free Google results
Six weeks in order: 30, 22, 28, 43, 62, 97 - 83 → 1.3
"steel roofing manufacturers near me"
Average position, page nine to page one - 2.39%
Search click rate, August
144 clicks on 6,036 impressions, the best month on all three measures - 8
New searches appearing
Including "metal roofing quote" and "best price on metal roofing near me"
Some searches moved the other way in the same window. "metal roofers near me" slipped from 4.0 to 9.3, "roofing goshen" from 6.0 to 10.7, and "steel masters" from 6.7 to 8.8. A case study that shows only the winners is a case study that picked them. August is 28 days of data rather than a full month. Source: Google Search Console, comparing August 1 to 26 against May 29 to July 31.
Cost per lead
Down from about $156 to about $104.
Local Services cost per lead by week: $155.76, then $246.15, then $122.84, then $133.22, then $89.18, then $103.89. The last two weeks are partial and Google keeps revising lead counts for several days after the fact, so treat them as provisional.
Two things changed at the same time. The service categories were narrowed so Steel Master stopped paying for leads on work it does not do, and the weekly budget was raised. Both happened together, so we are not going to attribute the improvement to either one alone.
Being straight with you
What we cannot claim yet.
No return on ad spend figure
Whether a lead became a signed job is recorded in Steel Master's office and does not yet reach our reporting. Until it does, the most honest number we can give is cost per lead. Any agency showing you return on ad spend without job outcomes connected is showing you a number it invented.
No before and after comparison
The site was not recording lead events before August 21 and was blocked from Google listings until launch week. We could publish a dramatic percentage by comparing a period with no measurement against a period with measurement. We are not going to, because the first follow up question would end the conversation.
What this means for your business
Most roofing contractors have no measurement at all.
If you cannot answer which marketing produced your last ten customers, that is the first thing worth fixing. Not more spend, not a new logo. The ability to know. Start with a free Report Card and I will send back an honest read on where your business stands online, graded across twelve areas, within 24 hours.