Somebody in a Facebook group says they get roofing leads for twenty-two dollars. Somebody else says a hundred and forty. Both of them are telling the truth and neither number helps you.
Cost per lead on its own is a vanity metric. It is easy to move and it tells you almost nothing about whether the money is working.
The number that matters
There are only two questions in paid lead generation.
What does it cost you to get a customer? And what is a customer worth to you?
If the second is comfortably bigger than the first, spend more. If it is not, fix something before you spend another dollar. Everything else, including cost per lead, is diagnostic detail underneath those two numbers.
A roofer paying twenty-two dollars a lead who closes one in forty is paying eight hundred and eighty dollars per customer. A roofer paying a hundred and forty who closes one in five is paying seven hundred. The second one has the better business, and if you only looked at cost per lead you would have picked the wrong one.
Work out your cost per lead and cost per customer
Two numbers come out of this and the second one is the important one. Plenty of roofers know what a lead costs them. Very few know what a customer costs them, which is the number that decides whether the ads are working.
Your numbers
What that means
Raising close rate by 5 points would drop your cost per customer to $188.68 without spending another dollar.
Include everything: ad spend, agency fees, lead subscriptions, print, sponsorships. Leaving costs out is how people convince themselves marketing is working.
What this assumed
- Spend covers only the money you paid for the channel, not your own time.
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This is an estimate
This tool returns an estimate based on the numbers you entered. Your real result depends on your own costs, rates and conditions. Check it against your own records before you make a decision with it.
How to run it, step by step
- 1Use one channel at a time. Do not blend Google, Facebook, a lead marketplace and door knocking into one number. They cost different amounts and close at very different rates, and blending them hides the one that is losing money.
- 2Count total spend, not just ad spend. Ad budget plus what you pay anyone managing it plus any per-lead fees. If you pay a marketplace per lead and an agency to run Google, both belong in the channel they came from.
- 3Count leads the way you would defend it. A lead is somebody who gave you contact information and wants a roof looked at. Not a click, not a form spam, not a wrong number. Clean the list before you divide.
- 4Enter your real close rate for that channel. Out of those leads, how many signed. Use the last ninety days, not last year, and keep it channel specific. Marketplace leads and referral leads do not close the same and pretending otherwise wrecks the math.
How to read what it gives you
- Cost per customer is the number to manage. A channel at ninety dollars a lead that closes one in four beats a channel at thirty a lead that closes one in twenty-five, every time.
- Compare cost per customer to your gross profit on an average job. If acquisition is eating a big share of gross profit, the problem is either the channel or the close rate, and you now know which.
- Run it separately for retail and insurance work. They have different close rates and different job values, and averaging them together tells you nothing you can act on.
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Three things that move cost per customer more than ad spend
Speed. This is the biggest one in roofing and it is not close. Roofing leads, especially shared ones, go to whoever calls first. Not whoever has the best reviews, not whoever has the nicest truck wrap. Whoever calls first. If your leads sit for two hours because they land in an inbox nobody watches, you are not buying leads, you are subsidizing your competitors' close rate.
Who calls. The person who calls a fresh roofing lead should be the person best at booking inspections, not whoever happens to be free. In a lot of companies the best closer is the owner and the leads go to whoever answered. That is backwards.
What happens on the third day. Most roofing leads do not sign on the first contact. They get an inspection, they get a proposal, and then they go quiet while they get two more quotes. What you do on days three through fourteen is where close rate is actually won, and in most companies the answer is nothing, because nobody has a follow-up sequence.
Where the leak usually is
Run the numbers per channel and you will typically find one of three patterns.
One channel is carrying everything. Cut the others and put the money there. This is the good outcome and it happens more than people expect.
Every channel looks bad. That is almost never a channel problem. That is a close rate problem or a speed problem, and buying more leads will make it worse, not better, because you will be losing more of them faster.
The numbers do not exist. You cannot say how many leads came from where, or what closed. This is the most common outcome, and it is the real finding. You have been making budget decisions on feel. Fix the tracking before you touch the budget.
Before you spend another dollar
Answer these four in writing. If you cannot, that is the project, not the ads.
Where did every lead in the last ninety days come from. How fast did somebody talk to a human. Which ones signed. What was the job worth.
A roofing company that can answer those four questions can improve. One that cannot is just buying lottery tickets with a monthly budget.
If you want to see what the delay is costing on its own, the lead response time math is worth running before you look at your ad account again.
Questions people actually ask
What is a normal cost per lead for roofing?
It varies enormously by market, season, storm activity and channel, and anybody who quotes you a single national number is guessing. The useful question is not what other people pay, it is what a lead is worth to you, which depends on your close rate and your job value.
Are shared lead marketplaces worth it?
Sometimes, at the right price, if you are fast. A shared lead is sold to several contractors and generally goes to whoever calls first. If you cannot respond within minutes, you are buying leads that other people are closing.
Should I count storm chasing work separately?
Yes. Storm season distorts every number in this business. Run your math on a normal period as your baseline, and treat storm windows as their own thing so you do not build your budget on numbers that only happen after hail.
My cost per lead went up. Should I pause the ads?
Look at cost per customer first. A rising cost per lead with a steady cost per customer means the leads got better, not worse. Pausing on cost per lead alone is how roofers turn off the channel that was actually working.