Price can vary depending on where you're buying the lead, but industry standard for the cost of exclusive roofing lead is $30 to $185.
Exclusive means these are leads that's sent directly to your company and your company only, and it's usually generated through Google Adwords or a Lead Generation website.
Shared leads can cost anywhere from $15 to $90, provided by companies like Homeadvisor or Thumbtack where they share your lead with 5-10 other contractors.
Obviously exclusive leads are more valuable because you don't have to get into bidding wars with other contractors, which means you can land jobs with much better profit margins.
Phone Calls are the Highest Quality Leads
Phone call leads are the highest quality, these are customers that have the most urgency in hiring a contractor.
Email & text leads are much less urgent, so it may require more time to close them.
Make Sure You're Paying for Qualified Leads Only
Make sure the company you buy your exclusive leads from has some sort of way to screen out telemarketers.
What most companies do is only count phone calls longer than 30 seconds, so if it's not a customer, then you have enough time to hang up on them and not pay for that call.
You should also define how far you're willing to travel to do a job. 50 miles for regular jobs and maybe up to 70 miles if its a bigger job?
Whatever distance you define should be discussed with the marketing company and any calls that are outside that reach should not be charged.
Google Adwords
Once we determine that exclusive phone leads is what you want more of, then you have to understand that Google Adwords is the place where you can immediately spend some money to get leads.
You can choose to learn AdWords on your own or hire a marketing agency.
Most agencies will try to get you on a monthly retainer, and they will use your budget to run Google AdWords.
Cost for the lead can fluctuate when running AdWords, it depends on how many other companies in your area are also running AdWords because the cost is a bidding system.
The more companies that are advertising in your area, the more expensive each lead will be.
This is why it is important to understand the value of each lead and the maximum amount you're willing to pay.
What's the most you should spend on a roofing lead?
Use this calculator to find out how much each lead is worth to your company, depending on your average job dollar amount, close rate, & profit margin.
So let's say the average roofing job you do is $2000
And your profit margin is 40%.
and you close 50% of your leads.
That means every lead is making your company $400
In the very beginning of the article, we mentioned that the industry standard for exclusive leads is anywhere from $30 to $185
Would you spend $185 to make $400?
Yes absolutely, a lot of roofing companies have no problem paying $200 for qualified roofing leads. How much you're able to pay depends on how well your company can close leads and having good profit margins.
This is why when hiring a new marketing company, its important to keep a close eye on these numbers, especially in the beginning, I would ask for weekly reports to see how much you're paying for each lead and how well your company is closing them.
What you can afford to spend on a lead boils down to figuring out these numbers & tracking them with the marketing team.
Shared Leads
These leads are shared with multiple contractors in your area, but in some cases it can still work if you're on top of getting back to these leads faster than your competition.
We have also seen cases where roofing companies are doing really well using HomeAdvisor because there simply wasn't too many other roofing companies in that area using that service.
Most of the time though, contractors will buy shared leads if they don't have organic rankings or Adwords campaign, because shared leads is better than no leads.
It is paramount to pay even closer attention to how much you're spending to acquire a customer, ultimately its a lot more competitive to get the job and the profit per job is lower.
Homeadvisor
HomeAdvisor is one of the top candidates for buying shared leads.
$300 annual membership fee, and the average cost of roofing leads are averaging $20 to $60 in 2024.
When I googled "affordable roofers near me", HomeAdvisor popped up at the very top, #1 spot in the paid ads section.
So yes even HomeAdvisor spends money on Adwords to get in front of customers, they also have strong presence in the organic rankings so yes they definitely have customers searching for roofing companies on their platform.
When I scrolled past the map listings, we also see Thumbtack, Angie's List & Yelp showing up at the top of organic search.
Thumbtack Roofing Lead Cost
Although prices can vary greatly depending on where you are, the average price of contractor leads on Thumbtack is $20-$50.
If Homeadvisor is #1 spot for shared leads, then I would put Thumbtack at #2, customers here tend to be even more price conscious.
Angie's List
To get your business listed, its anywhere from $30 to $2500 per month. You have to first call them, and ask for a quote. It seems to range greatly and there seems to be no consensus on the internet as to why their price ranges this much.
There's honestly mixed reviews on people that have complaints about Angie's list versus people that say they are decent.
Yelp
Yelp has monthly advertising packages ranging from $400 to $2250 per month, the results vary from city to city, the best advice when talking to their sales rep is to not get locked into any long-term contract, try to negotiate down to going month to month.
Also they do offer a $300 ad spend coupon so ask them to use that up first and measure your results.
Bottom Line
I personally wouldn't pay over $70 per roofing lead from any of these places offering shared lead or Angie's / Yelp.
Conclusion
First, use the calculator above to figure out just how much you'd be willing to pay for a roofing lead.
Then hire a marketing company that's willing to run a trial for you on AdWords. You may look to invest $3000 or so, for this trial.
Once the trial is over, you will have data to figure out if you should continue with AdWords or not.
If you have decent profit margins and you're able to close the leads well, you shouldn't have any problem spending $70 to $200 for a roofing lead.
Buying shared leads from Homeadvisor or Thumbtack should be a plan B option, and Angie's List / Yelp needs to be approached cautiously. It's only recommended if you have some extra marketing budget to play with.
There is one other way to get the highest quality leads and dominate your marketplace and that's being able to get your organic map listing & website at the top of the search engine.
Organic Rankings = Free Leads + High Quality
Many people will skip the ads section and go straight to this organic portion to call for a local roofer.
It is prime real estate to get your business shown here. The problem is you can't pay Google or anyone to get shown here. This is all about having ranking skills.
Your option is to hire a SEO company and hope that the company you hire knows what they're doing or to learn to do it yourself.
I recommend learning to do it yourself because once you learn the process, it's repeatable, you can create even more websites out there to get more leads for yourself.
We have a coaching program with 7400 students where we broke this process down in 5 simple steps. We've trained teenagers to grandparents to rank these sites at the top of Google.
It's worth it because once you're ranked, it's FREE leads.
You can find more info about this program here.
