The short answer
Buying roofing leads is renting access to customers, and your real cost is total spend divided by jobs actually won, not the advertised price per lead. Buy them when you are new or the diary has a hole in it next week, and build visibility you own alongside.
Key takeaways
- Your true cost is total spend divided by jobs won: in the worked example below, £350 a job rather than the £35 on the invoice.
- Shared platforms skew towards small emergency repairs, which is exactly where a fixed lead fee eats the whole margin.
- Buying leads is the right call when you are brand new, filling next week's diary, testing a service line, or need cash by Friday.
- Year one costs roughly the same either way; the difference is what you are holding on 31 December and what year two costs.
- If losing one lead supplier would be an emergency rather than an irritation, you do not have a marketing channel, you have a landlord.
If you are buying roofing leads, you know the feeling: the enquiry lands, you ring it inside two minutes, and the homeowner tells you three other roofers have already been out. You paid for that enquiry, and so did they. Here is the arithmetic behind the model, what a lead actually costs once you count only the jobs you won, and when buying leads is still the right call.
How pay-per-lead platforms actually make their money
Selling the same enquiry to several roofers is not a defect in the model, it is where the margin comes from.
Underneath the branding, nearly every pay-per-lead platform works the same way. A homeowner fills in a form or rings a tracked number. The platform sorts the enquiry into a category, flat roof, chimney, storm damage, re-roof, matches it to a postcode radius, then sells it, usually to more than one roofer, and charges each of you for receiving it.
That last part is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. A lead sold once earns one fee. The same lead sold to four roofers earns four fees, and the cost of producing it, the ad spend or the ranking that made the phone ring, has already been paid. Every extra roofer on the same enquiry is close to pure margin, so nobody should be surprised the model is built to share.
- Shared lead
- One enquiry sold to several roofers at once, each paying the full fee. Exclusivity and faster delivery cost more, and that premium is set by whichever roofer in your area wants work most badly this month.
Prices are tiered by job type, because the platform knows what each category is worth to you. A gutter clearance lead is cheap. A full re-roof lead is not.
There is usually a credit process for the obviously bad ones, wrong number, duplicate, outside your area. What you will not get back are the borderline ones, and those are the expensive ones.
The other thing worth naming is that the platform, not you, owns the relationship. The customer believes they found the platform. When the next roof job comes round they go back to it, and you pay again for a customer you already served well. That is not sharp practice. It is a rental market, and it is priced like one.
What a lead really costs once you only count won jobs
Divide a month's total spend by the jobs you actually won and, in the illustration below, a £35 lead becomes £350 of acquisition cost.
The advertised price per lead is not your cost of acquisition. Your cost of acquisition is total spend divided by jobs actually won.
Everything below is illustrative. I have made the numbers up to show the shape of the calculation, not to tell you what your business does. Replace every figure with your own from last quarter and it becomes useful.
Stage: Bought and paid for
- Leads left
- 40
- What happens to the rest
- £1,400 gone before you have priced anything
Stage: Still has a pulse
- Leads left
- 32
- What happens to the rest
- 8 are dead on arrival: wrong number, out of area, duplicate, tenant with no authority, already had it done. Some of those you claim back
Stage: You get a conversation
- Leads left
- 22
- What happens to the rest
- 10 never answer, go quiet, or have already booked someone
Stage: Worth pricing properly
- Leads left
- 14
- What happens to the rest
- The other 8 are not worth a proper price
Stage: Won
- Leads left
- 4
- What happens to the rest
- Three other roofers are pricing the same roof. That is a respectable strike rate on shared work
Stage: Cost per job won
- Leads left
- £350
- What happens to the rest
- £1,400 divided by 4, not the £35 on the invoice
| Stage | Leads left | What happens to the rest |
|---|---|---|
| Bought and paid for | 40 | £1,400 gone before you have priced anything |
| Still has a pulse | 32 | 8 are dead on arrival: wrong number, out of area, duplicate, tenant with no authority, already had it done. Some of those you claim back |
| You get a conversation | 22 | 10 never answer, go quiet, or have already booked someone |
| Worth pricing properly | 14 | The other 8 are not worth a proper price |
| Won | 4 | Three other roofers are pricing the same roof. That is a respectable strike rate on shared work |
| Cost per job won | £350 | £1,400 divided by 4, not the £35 on the invoice |
Whether £350 is fine or fatal depends entirely on the job. On a £6,000 re-roof it is under six per cent of the ticket and no sensible roofer would complain. On a £550 repair with maybe £200 of gross margin in it, £350 has eaten the job, the margin and part of the next one.
That mix is what squeezes you, and shared platforms skew towards the small end. A leaking roof in a downpour is the job a homeowner searches for in a panic before filling in the first form they find. A planned re-roof is the one they research, ask a neighbour about, and check your own site and reviews before ringing.
Then there is time, which never appears on the invoice. Forty leads chased fast, at ten minutes each, is six or seven hours a month on the phone, most of it on enquiries you will not win.
What twelve months costs each way, and what you own at the end
Year one comes out at near enough the same money on either path, so the honest case for owned visibility is what you are holding on 31 December, not the price.
Take the same illustrative roofer and run a year forward two ways. The figures below carry on from the ones I made up above; the only numbers here you should treat as fixed are my own prices.
Keep buying and it is £1,400 a month, twelve times over. Build instead and it is a website at a fixed £1,995 once plus Local SEO from £495 a month, which comes to roughly half the lead spend. That looks like an easy win until you account for the lag.
You cannot switch the leads off on the day you start. The effort on the owned side is front-loaded and the return is not: photographs of finished jobs, review requests, pages for each service and each town. That work happens in months one to three and returns nothing in months one to three. It is slower and it asks more of you.
So the realistic year is both, and that is the third column below. Full lead spend for four months, half for the next four, a quarter for the last four, and only if owned enquiries are genuinely arriving to justify each step down.
Twelve months: Year one spend
- Keep buying leads
- £16,800
- Build owned visibility
- £7,935
- The realistic taper
- About £17,700
Twelve months: Made up of
- Keep buying leads
- £1,400 a month for twelve months
- Build owned visibility
- £1,995 website once, plus £495 a month
- The realistic taper
- £9,800 on leads, plus £7,935 on site and SEO
Twelve months: When work starts arriving
- Keep buying leads
- Week one, and the tap is adjustable
- Build owned visibility
- Front-loaded effort, nothing back in months one to three
- The realistic taper
- Week one from leads, owned enquiries later
Twelve months: What you hold on 31 December
- Keep buying leads
- Twelve months of receipts
- Build owned visibility
- A website you own, a profile you control, reviews with your name on them
- The realistic taper
- The receipts and the assets
Twelve months: Year two
- Keep buying leads
- Another £16,800, probably more
- Build owned visibility
- £5,940, because the website is paid for
- The realistic taper
- Lower only if the taper actually held
| Twelve months | Keep buying leads | Build owned visibility | The realistic taper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year one spend | £16,800 | £7,935 | About £17,700 |
| Made up of | £1,400 a month for twelve months | £1,995 website once, plus £495 a month | £9,800 on leads, plus £7,935 on site and SEO |
| When work starts arriving | Week one, and the tap is adjustable | Front-loaded effort, nothing back in months one to three | Week one from leads, owned enquiries later |
| What you hold on 31 December | Twelve months of receipts | A website you own, a profile you control, reviews with your name on them | The receipts and the assets |
| Year two | Another £16,800, probably more | £5,940, because the website is paid for | Lower only if the taper actually held |
Near enough the same money in year one, and that is the fair comparison: the case for owned visibility is not that it is cheaper to begin with. Year two is where the two paths separate, because every year more roofers bid for the same enquiries and the price direction on the lead side is up.
Four situations where buying leads is genuinely the right call
Four moments make lead spend the correct decision, plus one about geography, and I would say so even though it is not what I sell.
I am not going to pretend this is one-sided. Lead platforms do a real job, and there are four situations where buying is the right decision rather than a compromise.
1. You are brand new
No website, no reviews, no Google Business Profile, no trading history. There is nothing for Google to rank because you have not given it anything yet. Buying leads is then the fastest legitimate route to your first ten jobs and, more importantly, your first ten reviews, which are the raw material everything else is built from. I would genuinely rather a new roofer spent their first thousand pounds on leads and came out with ten jobs and ten reviews than spent it with me and sat waiting.
2. There is a hole in next week's diary
January, a wet fortnight, a big job that slipped. Local SEO cannot fill next Tuesday. Nothing I do can fill next Tuesday. Lead spend can, that same afternoon. Buying work to cover a quiet patch is not a failure of strategy, it is what the tool is for.
3. You are testing a new service line
Before you commit pages, photographs and months of effort to flat roofing, or to solar panel removal and refit, a few hundred pounds of leads in that category tells you whether people near you buy it, at your price, at the volume you need. That is cheap research.
4. The money is needed this week
The van needs work, wages are due Friday, and the answer has to arrive in days rather than months. Lead spend is one of very few levers in this trade that moves that fast. Turn it on, get the work, keep the lads busy. Anyone who tells you to ride it out while your rankings mature has never had to make payroll.
And one about geography rather than timing
In a dense city centre with national firms bidding hard on every search, owned visibility is a long grind and paid enquiries may stay a permanent part of the mix. That is a legitimate answer, not a defeat.
How to run bought leads as a throttle rather than a foundation
Established roofers keep both and move the ratio with the diary, which only works once you track enquiries by source.
Almost nobody who has been going a few years is at zero or a hundred. What established roofers settle into is a mix, where bought leads are the throttle and owned visibility is the baseline. Diary full through summer, turn the spend down. February looking thin, turn it back up. The leads stop being your business and become a dial you control.
That only works if you know your numbers by source, and in my experience most roofers do not. So start there.
Track every enquiry by source for a quarter
Ask every caller how they found you and write it down: source, quoted, won, job value. Do it for three months and the argument stops being a matter of opinion.
Cut the worst-performing category first
Usually the cheap small-repair leads, where the fee eats the margin. Shift the ratio one notch at a time rather than making a clean break.
Set a ceiling per lead, not only a monthly budget
If a category's typical job value cannot carry a £45 fee at your strike rate, decline the category rather than the whole platform.
The target is not zero. The target is that if the platform doubled its prices next month, changed how it shares enquiries, or dropped you for a bigger firm, it would be an irritation rather than an emergency.
If losing that one supplier would put your business in trouble, you do not have a marketing channel, you have a landlord.
The four things you actually own, and the test that decides it
Owned means it survives you sacking your provider, and only four things pass that test: the site, the Google profile, the reviews and the rankings.
Owned is a word marketers throw around loosely, so here it is concretely. Four things, one test: if you stopped paying your provider on Friday, would you still have it on Monday?
A website you own. Domain registered in your name, not your web company's. Hosting you can move. Admin logins you hold. Content and photographs you can export. This is why I build sites at a fixed £1,995 and hand them over, rather than licensing you a site that stops being yours the month you stop paying. If your provider cannot answer straight on who holds the domain, you are renting.
A Google Business Profile you control. Verified against your own account, your own number, your own service areas, filled with photographs of your finished work. It is free, usually the biggest single source of local roofing enquiries, and the asset most roofers only half own because someone set it up for them years ago and left.
Reviews under your own name. A review left on a third-party directory builds that directory's asset: it sits behind their brand, feeds their rankings, and does not come with you if you stop paying the membership. A review on your own Google profile follows the business for as long as it exists, shows in the map results, and can be pulled onto your own site. Same effort from the customer, very different outcome for you.
Rankings that do not switch off. An enquiry from a service page ranking for the flat roof repair search in your town costs nothing on arrival. Getting there is not free and staying there needs maintaining, which is what the Local SEO for roofers page covers. But it does not stop at midnight because a card declined, and it does not arrive shared three ways.
None of that is faster than buying leads. All of it is yours afterwards.
Where I stand, and the four steps I would take next
Work out your real cost per won job by category, kill the worst category, and put that money into something you own.
My position, so you can weigh what you have just read. JTandy does not sell leads and does not buy them. I build websites at a fixed £1,995 and do Local SEO from £495 a month, and every enquiry those produce comes to you alone, with no fee per enquiry at either end. That is a commercial position rather than a moral one. Lead platforms do a job, and I have described four situations where it is the right one.
Pull last quarter's lead spend
Count the jobs you actually won from it and divide. That figure, not the price per lead, is your cost of acquisition.
Split it by category
The average hides the fact that one or two categories are carrying the rest.
Kill the worst category
Put that money into building something you own instead.
Keep the spreadsheet going
In six months the numbers, not a marketer, will tell you where to move next.
If you want a second opinion before you move any money, start with the free audit. I look at your site, your Google Business Profile and how you show up against the other roofers in your patch, and you get it back within 3 working days. Reviewed personally by me, no sales call, and if the honest answer is that your area is a hard one and your lead spend is doing a decent job for now, that is what it will say.
Get My Free Roofing SEO Audit.
The bottom line
Buying leads is renting access to customers, and the rent goes up. It is the right tool when you are new, when the diary has a hole in it next week, when you are testing a service line, or when the van needs work by Friday. It is a poor foundation for a business you intend to still be running in five years. Most established roofers land on a mix, then shift the ratio slowly as the enquiries they own start arriving. Work out your real cost per won job first, then decide.
Where to go next
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help Verification, ownership and the fact that a profile costs nothing to create and manage.
Written by James Tandy
James builds high-converting websites and runs local SEO for UK home-service businesses, with ten years spent turning local search into booked jobs. More about James →