Ask a roofing contractor what their leads cost and you’ll usually get a confident, specific answer. Ask what a signed job costs to acquire and the room goes quiet. That gap is where margin disappears.
Why cost per lead misleads
Cost per lead measures the price of entering the funnel. It says nothing about the shape of the funnel. Two sources at identical prices can differ by a factor of five in what they eventually cost per signed contract.
Source A — cheap shared leads
- $50 per lead → 200 leads
- 35% reach rate → 70 conversations
- 30% book an appointment → 21 appointments
- 60% actually show → 12.6 inspections
- 35% close → 4.4 jobs
Cost per acquisition: roughly $2,270.
Source B — exclusive booked appointments
- $300 per appointment → 33 appointments
- 85% show → 28 inspections
- 35% close → 9.8 jobs
Cost per acquisition: roughly $1,020. Source B costs six times more per unit and delivers jobs at less than half the acquisition cost.
These are illustrative figures to show the mechanics of the calculation, not published Rooftop performance data. Run the arithmetic on your own numbers — that’s the entire point of the article.
The costs contractors leave out
- Estimator time on dead appointments. A no-show still costs two hours of a salaried person’s day plus fuel.
- Chase time. Somebody dials the unreachable leads. Six attempts across 130 unreachable contacts is roughly a full working week.
- Discounting under competition. A 5% concession on an $18,000 job is $900 — often more than the lead cost.
- Opportunity cost. Time spent on a bad-fit lead is time not spent on a good one.
How to calculate it properly
Over a fixed window — a quarter works better than a month, because roofing is seasonal — total everything spent on generating work, add loaded estimator hours spent on appointments that produced no contract, then divide by the number of contracts signed from that spend. Then split it by source.
The ratio that actually matters
Once you have CPA, compare it to average job value:
- Above 15% of job value — you’re likely buying poorly qualified volume.
- 8–15% — normal for competitive storm markets.
- Below 8% — either strong repeat and referral flow, or an unusually efficient channel worth scaling immediately.
What to do with the number
Kill your worst source. Not shrink it — kill it. The spend redeployed to your best channel almost always outperforms the marginal volume you lose.
Measure show rate separately. It’s the biggest lever between spend and revenue, and the one most contractors never isolate.
The short version
Cheap leads are only cheap at the point of purchase. Everywhere downstream they cost more than they saved. The contractors who grow profitably are usually the ones paying the most per unit and the least per job.
Price a channel that bills on inspections.
Only pay for appointments your team actually gets to inspect.