What a roofing lead actually costs

A roofer calls three agencies. One quotes $40 a lead. Another quotes $85. The third does not sell leads at all, it sells rankings. On the surface, the $40 lead looks like the obvious choice. It usually is not, and the reason has nothing to do with the price.

The number that matters is not cost per lead

It is value per lead: what an average lead is actually worth to your business once you account for how often it turns into a signed job. Two numbers decide it:

• Average contract value: what a signed job is worth to you, on average.
• Close rate: the share of leads that actually become signed jobs.

Multiply them and you get value per lead. Compare that to what you are paying per lead, from any source, and you have a real number instead of a guess.

A worked example, using our own numbers

We publish our results with the dashboard behind every figure, so we can use our own accounts as the example instead of a hypothetical. Across the five roofing companies we work with this year: 1,089 tracked opportunities, 115 closed contracts, $1.58M in signed revenue, for a blended close rate of 10.6% and an average signed contract of $13,773.

Run the calculation: $13,773 average contract × 10.6% close rate is roughly $1,460 in value per opportunity, blended across all five accounts. Put another way, it takes an average of about 9.5 opportunities in the pipeline to produce one closed contract (1,089 ÷ 115).

That blended number hides real spread. Roofing 101 closes at 16.9% once a lead reaches the pipeline, the highest close rate of any account we run, because the fix there was intake speed, not traffic volume. Hero Roofing is closing at 7.8%, and we say so on the case study page rather than hiding it, because a lower close rate changes what the next move should be: fix intake before buying more traffic.

Why this changes how you compare channels

A $40 paid lead and a $40 organic lead are not the same lead if they close at different rates. Paid leads are often shared with other roofers or arrive with less intent than someone who searched, read your site, and called you directly. If a cheaper lead source closes at half the rate of a more expensive one, the cheaper source can easily cost more per booked job. You only see that once close rate is in the calculation.

This is also why we do not publish a single "cost per lead" number for our own work. It depends entirely on the account, the channel mix, and the close rate at the point the account starts, which is why every case study on this site states its own numbers rather than a blended average standing in for all of them.

Run your own numbers

We built a calculator that does this math for you. Enter your average contract value and close rate and it returns value per lead on the spot. It runs in your browser; nothing you enter is sent anywhere. Use the roofing lead value calculator on the resources page, then compare that number to whatever you are currently paying per lead, from any source, before your next conversation with an agency, including us.