Ads, pages and follow-up
for York Region trades.

I do, from Aurora. Versorix is one person, and I run paid ads, the landing page and the lead follow-up for owner-run trades: roofers, HVAC companies, plumbers, landscapers, painters, cleaners and the rest of the list on my industries page. Nobody sits between us, so the person on your first call is the person in your ad account every day after you sign.

Fit comes down to two numbers. One job has to be worth at least a few hundred dollars to you, and your crew has to have room for more of them. If you're booked eight weeks out, more leads this month mostly means more people waiting on you, and I'd tell you that on the call before you spend a dollar.

Whoever you end up talking to, in York Region or downtown, ask who makes the ads and whether that person will ever stand on one of your jobs. Then ask who owns the ad account. I put a longer list in how to choose a marketing company after you've been burned.

About 321,000 York Region households own their home, and owners make up 82% of households here, the highest share in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (the City of Toronto is at 52%). Those numbers come from York Region's report on the 2021 census. For a business that sells to homeowners, that's a big pool within a short drive of Aurora.

They aren't spread evenly. Markham (90,540 owner households) and Vaughan (89,275) hold 56% of the region's owners between them, Richmond Hill has 54,210, and the north end is thinner, with Newmarket at 22,955, Aurora at 17,475, East Gwillimbury at 9,600 and King at 7,780. Single detached houses are 62% of the region's homes, which is a lot of roofs, furnaces and lawns per street.

Here's what I'd do with that. Draw the ad area around how far your crew will drive at 4 p.m. on a Thursday, and stop there. A Newmarket company that targets all of York Region ends up showing a big share of its budget to homeowners in Markham and Vaughan, because that's where more than half the owners live, and then it turns down the leads from Woodbridge. If you sell replacements, 39% of York Region owner-occupiers have paid off their mortgage and about half of those owners are 65 or older, so I'd build at least one ad with that homeowner in mind.

Two costs: ad spend and my fee. I don't start an account under about $50 a day in ad spend, which is $1,500 a month, and search ads need more, closer to $100 a day, because each click costs more. My monthly fee sits on top of the spend.

Those are floors. Below them, the ad platforms don't get enough leads in a week to learn who books, so you keep paying for guesses. Above them, the right number comes from your jobs, since a roof replacement can carry far more ad spend per booked job than a drain clearing, and I work it out from what a job is worth to you and how many of your quotes close. The math is in how much should you spend on ads, and the packages are on what you get.

It depends on whether people go looking for you. When the job starts with something breaking (a furnace quitting in January, water coming through a ceiling), search ads catch the homeowner while they're typing it in. When the job sells once someone sees it, like a patio, interlock, a basement finish or a new roof, social ads put your finished work in front of homeowners before they've started looking.

Lots of trades end up on both. With a smaller budget I'd fund one properly first, because $1,500 a month split across two platforms leaves both of them short of the leads they need to learn, and you end up judging two half-run tests. In York Region the season usually decides it. I'd put a furnace company on search from November through March and start a landscaper's social ads in February, aimed at spring installs.

Six to eight weeks before your first booked job of the season, and earlier for big-ticket work that needs quotes and designs. If your crews start in mid-April, that means ads running by late February and a call with me in January, because the build (the ad account, the tracking, the page and the first round of ads) takes most of the first month before anything goes live.

The season here has a shape you can plan around. Snow usually comes off the lawns sometime in late March or April, spring cleanups, roof repairs and patio quotes all pile into the same few weeks, and November goes quiet for anyone working outside. Launch the week the rush opens and the platform spends its testing weeks on your most valuable leads. Snow trades run the other way. Their contracts usually get signed in the fall, so those ads go up in August and September.

If November empties your calendar every year, start in September. I wrote up the pre-selling side, deposits for spring spots and working last year's customers, in booking the slow season.

Yes, if your package includes production. On those packages I drive out from Aurora and spend a production day filming your crew, your trucks and finished jobs, and that footage becomes the ads. On social-ad packages without a shoot day, I write your crew a shot list, they film on their phones, and I turn it into ads.

Footage from your own jobs gives a homeowner in Richmond Hill less to wonder about than a stock photo of somebody else's crew, because she can see your truck on a street that looks like hers. The ad platforms also read what's in the picture when they decide who to show an ad to, so your jobs give them more to work with. Anywhere in York Region is a short drive for me. Pick a day when the crew is mid-job or a patio has just been finished.

Within minutes. People asking for a quote usually ask a few companies the same afternoon and go with whoever gets back first. When I checked 149 owner-run GTA home-service websites in October 2026, 92 had a quote or contact form and said nothing about when you'd hear back, and on 54 of the 134 that loaded on a phone, the first screen showed no call button or phone number.

You're on a roof or in a crawlspace when plenty of leads come in, so the answer can't depend on you picking up. On packages with the follow-up system, every new lead gets a text within seconds, a missed call gets a text back, and the lead shows up on your phone with their details so you can call when you're down. Speed to lead goes through why the first few minutes win so many jobs, the cost of a missed call does the math on the ones you miss, and the full count is in the GTA lead-handling study. Start with your own contact page.