Shared Roofing Leads vs Exclusive Leads: What a Signed Job Really Costs

Compare lead sources by what you spend for each signed contract, not by the price of a lead. A shared lead can look cheap and still cost more per signed job than an exclusive lead at two or three times the price, because you're splitting the homeowner with other roofers and paying for the ones you never reach. Organic leads from your own rankings cost the most up front and the least once they start coming in. The math below shows how that works, with numbers you should replace with your own.

The one number to track

Cost per signed job is the total you spent on a source in a period, divided by the jobs you signed from that source in the same period.

"Total spent" means more than the vendor's invoice:

• Lead fees, minus the credits you actually received (not the ones you asked for).
• Time spent calling homeowners who never pick up. If an office person does it, that's wages. If you do it, it's hours you're not on a roof or at a kitchen table closing a deal.
• Inspections that went nowhere: drive time, ladder time, the estimate you wrote up and never heard back on.

Tag each job with the source that first brought the homeowner in, and count signed contracts. Appointments and "good conversations" don't pay for anything.

A worked example

Every number in this section is made up to show the math. Lead prices, contact rates and close rates vary a lot by market, by vendor and by how fast your team works the leads. Use yours.

Say you spend about $5,000 on each of three sources.

Shared leads. You buy 100 shared leads at $50 each. Each one goes to several roofers at the same moment. You reach 45 homeowners; the rest never answer, gave a bad number or already booked someone else. 18 agree to an inspection. You sign 3.

Exclusive leads. You buy 40 exclusive leads at $125 each. You're the only roofer calling, so you reach more of them: 28. You book 16 inspections and sign 5.

Organic leads. You pay $400 a month for SEO for a year, $4,800 in total. For the first four months nothing measurable comes in, which is normal. From month five to month twelve, say four homeowners a month find you on Google and call or fill out your form: 32 leads. Because they contacted you, you reach nearly all of them, 30. You book 18 and sign 7.

	Shared	Exclusive	Organic, year one
Spend	$5,000	$5,000	$4,800
Leads	100	40	32
Homeowners reached	45	28	30
Inspections	18	16	18
Signed jobs	3	5	7
Cost per lead	$50	$125	$150
Cost per signed job	$1,667	$1,000	$686

Look at the last two rows. Ranked by cost per lead, the sources come out in exactly the reverse order from cost per signed job. The shared column also hides the most unpaid work: 100 names to chase, and 82 of them never got as far as an inspection.

The organic column is the least certain one, and you should read it that way. Nobody can promise four leads a month from SEO. It depends on your town, how many roofers compete there and how much work your site and profile need. Run the same column with one lead a month from month five: 8 leads, maybe 2 signed jobs, $2,400 per job. That's worse than either bought source. What changes in year two is that the rankings you built keep producing, if they hold, without a fee per lead, while bought leads cost the same every month you buy them.

Add your calling time

Leads cost labor too. Say each shared lead takes four call attempts at about three minutes each, counting texts and notes. 100 leads is 400 attempts, roughly 20 hours. At $25 an hour for an office person, that's $500, or another $167 on top of each signed job.

Forty exclusive leads at three attempts each is about 6 hours, $150, or $30 per signed job. Organic callers mostly reach you on the first try, so the time goes into answering, not chasing.

With labor in, the shared column moves to about $1,833 per signed job and the exclusive column to about $1,030. Now hold that against what a job leaves you. Say your average replacement leaves $4,000 in gross profit after materials and labor. Shared leads eat 46% of it; exclusive leads eat about a quarter. And if one of those three shared-lead jobs was a $600 repair, the real picture is worse than the average suggests.

What "exclusive" should mean

Vendors use the word in different ways. Before you pay a premium for it, get answers in writing:

• Is the lead sold to you only, forever, or exclusive for a window of time and then sold again?
• Where did it come from: the vendor's own sites, paid ads, a call center, or a form on a site that had nothing to do with roofing?
• Did the homeowner know a roofer would call, and that it would be you?
• What counts as a bad lead, how fast you have to report it and how credits get paid?
• Does it filter by your service area and job type, or will you get gutter cleanings 60 miles away?

A simple test: for the first 30 leads from a new vendor, ask each homeowner, "Have any other roofers called you about this?" If several say yes, you have your answer about exclusivity, whatever the contract says.

Speed decides shared leads

With a shared lead, the race starts the second it lands. The homeowner filled out one form and their phone starts ringing from several numbers. The roofer who gets through first, sounds local and offers a specific inspection time tends to win. The ones who call back after lunch often find the inspection already booked.

What that takes in practice:

1. Leads go to a phone that someone carries, not an inbox checked twice a day.
2. Call within minutes. If nobody answers, text right away: "Hi, this is Mike with [Company] Roofing about the roof request you sent. Is now a good time, or later today?"
3. Call again within the hour, again that evening and once the next day. Then mark it dead, so it shows up in your numbers.
4. Offer a specific time on the first call: "I can be there tomorrow at 10 or Thursday at 4."

Speed matters with exclusive and organic leads too, with less pressure. A homeowner who found you in the Map Pack has two other roofers' numbers on the same screen, and a missed call sends them straight to the next one.

Run your own numbers this month

Pull the last 90 days. For each source, write down total spend, leads, homeowners reached, inspections, signed jobs and revenue. If you don't know which source a job came from, start asking every caller today; in 90 days you'll have numbers you can trust.

If you'd rather not build a spreadsheet, the cost per roof calculator compares bought shared leads with an SEO plan using your own lead price, close rate and your own guess at organic leads.

Then keep whatever signs jobs below the cost you can live with, and cut whatever doesn't. Most roofers end up with a mix: bought leads to fill the schedule now and organic leads building underneath.

If you want more of your work to come from homeowners who found you on their own, see how our roofing lead generation through SEO is set up. It takes months to build, so keep your best paid source running while it does.