On this page
What you are actually buying
A roofing lead is a row in somebody else's database. The seller ran an advert, someone filled in a form, and that row is now a product. Three things decide whether it is worth anything to you, and only one of them is the price.
- How many other roofers get it. The same enquiry sold to four firms is not a lead, it is a race. The winner is usually whoever picks up the phone first, not whoever quotes best.
- How it was generated. An enquiry from somebody who searched "roof leaking emergency" behaves nothing like one from somebody who clicked a social advert offering a free roof survey. Both get called leads.
- Whether the job is the job you want. A full re-roof and a ridge tile repair arrive through the same form. Lead sellers rarely price them differently, so the mix decides your economics and you do not control the mix.
The arithmetic nobody puts on the sales page
Work it out in the direction that matters. Not cost per lead, cost per won job:
| Input | What to use |
|---|---|
| Price per lead | Whatever you are quoted, including any joining or minimum monthly fee spread across the leads you actually receive |
| Contact rate | The share you reach at all. Count from your own phone records, not the seller's claim |
| Quote rate | The share of contacted enquiries you get to survey or price |
| Close rate | The share of quotes that become work |
Multiply the three rates together, divide the lead price by the result, and you have your real cost per job. Roofers are routinely surprised by how large that number is, because the three rates compound. Reaching seven in ten, quoting half of those and closing a third of those is one job from every twelve enquiries. At £25 a lead that is £300 of acquisition on every job you win.
Then ask the question that decides everything: what would the same £300 a job have bought if it had gone into your own search presence? Nothing on this site invents an answer to that. It depends on your area, your trade mix and how bad your current site is. But the money is the same money, and one version of it leaves you with an asset.
What "generating your own" actually involves
It is not mysterious and it is not quick. Four parts:
- Search adverts against the searches that mean work now. "Emergency roof repair", "flat roof replacement cost", "roofer near me" with the town attached. Negative keywords doing as much work as the keywords, so you stop paying for people looking for jobs, training courses and materials.
- A page that answers the search. Someone who searched flat roofing should land on flat roofing, not a homepage with a slider. The site is not decoration here, it is the conversion rate.
- Tracking that ties the phone call to the search term. Without it you are optimising blind and every review of the account is a guess.
- Follow-up that does not leak. Most roofing enquiries are lost between the phone ringing and a price being sent, not at the price. A missed call that gets an automatic text back is worth more than another lead.
That last point is the one most roofers underrate. If you are buying leads and not answering half of them, buying more leads makes the problem more expensive, not smaller.
What we have actually measured
PipelineOS is the sister agency of Mecosse, and the measured advertising results come from real scaffolding, roofing, glazing and surfacing accounts. On one live Google Ads account: 354 tracked conversions in 30 days at a 21.08% conversion rate and a £0.38 average cost per click. On another: 41 conversions at £10.79 each at a 12.76% click-through rate. Screenshots of the account overviews, unedited, are on the results page and available on a call.
Those are conversions, meaning a phone call or a completed contact form, not jobs won. We count them that way deliberately and say so on the methodology page. Anyone quoting you leads-to-jobs ratios off their own advertising is quoting your sales team's performance, not theirs.
When buying leads is the right call
There is an honest case for it, and refusing to say so would be a sales tactic rather than advice. Buy leads when:
- You have capacity this week and no pipeline. Advertising takes days to warm up and weeks to tune; a bought lead is available this afternoon.
- You are testing a new area or a new job type and do not yet want to commit to building pages and campaigns for it.
- Your closing rate is genuinely high and your call-back is genuinely fast. If you win one in four of everything you speak to, the maths forgives a lot.
Stop buying when the invoices have become a permanent line in your accounts and you still have no search presence of your own. That is the point at which you are paying rent on demand you could have owned.
Six questions to ask any lead seller
- How many firms receive this enquiry, in writing?
- Which advert or search term produced it?
- What is your refund or credit policy for a wrong number, a tenant with no authority, or a job outside my stated type?
- Is there a minimum monthly spend or a notice period?
- Do I get the customer's details immediately, or after you have qualified them?
- If I stop buying, do I keep anything at all?
The last one is the point of this page. The answer is always no.
Want the number for your own business rather than an average?Bring your contact rate, your quote rate and your close rate to the call and we will do the arithmetic with you, whether or not it points at us.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
How much does a roofing lead cost in the UK?
Nobody can tell you honestly, because no independent UK dataset exists. Lead sellers quote their own prices, which vary by postcode, job type and how many roofers they are selling the same enquiry to. The figure that matters is not the price of the lead but the price of the job you win: a £20 lead shared with four firms and closed one time in eight costs £160 a job, before you have spoken to anyone.
Are shared roofing leads worth buying?
Sometimes, and the honest answer depends on your closing rate and your spare capacity. If your diary has gaps and you are quick on the phone, a shared lead you reach first can still pay. If you are already busy, or you are slow to call back, shared leads are a subsidy to whichever competitor answers faster.
What is the difference between an exclusive and a shared lead?
A shared lead is sold to several roofers at once, so you are in a race you did not choose. An exclusive lead is sold only to you. Exclusive costs more per lead and usually closes better, but the word is not regulated: ask in writing how many firms receive the enquiry and what happens if you reject it.
Is it better to buy leads or generate your own?
Bought leads are rented; generated leads are owned. A roofer who buys leads for three years has three years of invoices. A roofer who spends the same money on their own search presence has a site, an account history and a phone number people call directly. Buying makes sense to fill a gap now. It does not make sense as the whole plan.
How fast do you have to call a roofing lead back?
Faster than you think, though the famous 'five minutes or you lose them' figure is weaker than it is quoted as being. The often-cited study dates from 2007, covered six companies and reports odds ratios rather than probabilities. We wrote up what it actually says on the claims page. The direction is real even where the multiplier is not.
Do you sell roofing leads?
No. PipelineOS builds the advertising, the site and the follow-up so the enquiries arrive in your own account, under your own phone number, belonging to you. There is no shared pool and no markup on ad spend.