Buying leads or generating your own

Two different economics

A bought lead is a variable cost with a fixed unit price. You pay a set figure the moment a contact detail lands, whether that contact becomes a £12,000 re-roof or a wrong number. The platform carries the risk of finding the enquiry; you carry the risk of converting it. Nothing accumulates. The lead you bought in March has no effect whatsoever on what the lead in April costs.

A generated lead works the other way round. You carry the risk up front, in ad spend or in months of unpaid effort, and in exchange the unit cost tends to fall over time. A Google Ads account with twelve months of conversion history bids more accurately than the same account on day one. A page that has ranked for two years does not send you an invoice when someone clicks it. The asset compounds, but only if somebody is actually tending it.

Neither model is virtuous. One is rented distribution and one is owned distribution, and the correct choice depends on your job value, your close rate, how fast you answer a phone, and how much cash you can put at risk before the first job lands.

What “shared” actually costs you

The word that changes the arithmetic is shared. When an enquiry is sold to more than one contractor, the price on the invoice is not the price of the job. It is the price of an entry into a race.

Say a lead costs you £40 and is sold to four firms. If all four ring back and one wins, the winner has paid £40 for the job and the other three have paid £40 for nothing. Averaged across the market, the effective cost per won job is four times the sticker price, and the person who wins is usually whoever called first rather than whoever quotes best. That is why speed to response dominates every conversation about shared leads: on a shared platform you are not competing on craft, you are competing on how quickly somebody in your office picks up.

Three consequences follow, and they are worth being blunt about.

• Your close rate on bought leads will be lower than on your own enquiries. Not because the people are worse, but because they are talking to three other firms and often did not expect four phone calls. Compare like with like when you judge the channel.
• Price becomes the axis of comparison. Four quotes arriving in the same week invites a spreadsheet. Enquiries that come to you directly, off your own site or a recommendation, start from a different place.
• Refund and credit policies matter more than headline price. What counts as an invalid lead, how long you have to report it, and whether credits expire will move your real cost per job further than a couple of pounds on the unit price.

None of that makes the model dishonest. It makes it a distribution channel with terms, and the terms deserve reading properly rather than skimming during a sales call.

Running the arithmetic on both

There is no published, independent UK benchmark for cost per lead by trade. The Competition and Markets Authority obtained genuine UK figures from Google under statutory powers during its 2020 online platforms market study and redacted them from the public version, so the numbers exist but nobody outside that process has seen them. Any “average UK cost per lead” table you find is either one agency’s own client data or United States figures with the currency symbol changed. Treat both accordingly.

The only figures worth quoting are the ones that state their sample. For scale rather than for planning: WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2026 search advertising analysis, drawn from 13,474 United States campaigns and reported as medians per campaign rather than means, puts Home & Home Improvement at a $8.33 cost per click and a $90.92 cost per lead, against all-industry medians of $5.42 and $66.69. That is American money, American auctions and American search behaviour. It tells you the order of magnitude and nothing more precise than that.

Your own arithmetic is more reliable than any of it, and takes ten minutes. Work out four numbers and the decision usually makes itself.

• Average job value across the last twenty jobs, not the memorable ones.
• Gross margin on that job once materials, labour and travel are out.
• Close rate, split by source. Quotes issued against jobs won, for bought leads and for direct enquiries separately.
• Gross profit per enquiry, which is margin multiplied by close rate. That figure is the ceiling on what an enquiry is allowed to cost.

A firm with a £600 average job, 40% margin and a one-in-four close rate makes £60 of gross profit per enquiry. At £40 a shared lead, that business is working for £20 an enquiry before overheads, and one bad month of lead quality wipes it out. A firm quoting £9,000 with a one-in-three close rate has hundreds of pounds of headroom and can afford to be relaxed about either channel. Most arguments about whether lead buying “works” are really arguments about a number that nobody in the room has calculated. Our methodology page sets out how we run that check before anything is built.

What owning the channel buys

The case for generating your own is not that it is cheaper on day one. Often it is not. The case is that four things accumulate, and none of them accumulate when you buy.

• Conversion history. An advertising account that knows which searches produced quoted work bids differently from one that does not. That history sits in your account and stays with you, which is why account ownership is the first thing to settle with any agency.
• Organic ground. Rankings and a Google Business Profile carry part of the pipeline without a click cost attached, so paid spend goes on the margin rather than the whole of it. See SEO services for what that actually involves.
• A database. Every enquiry you generate is a contact you may market to again. Boiler service, gutter clear, a second phase of the same job. Bought leads that did not convert are usually not yours to keep.
• Positioning. You choose what the ad says, what the page promises and what a minimum job looks like. On a directory or a lead platform you are presented in the format they have chosen for everyone.

The counterweight is honest: it needs somebody to run it, it needs a landing page that answers the search rather than describing your history, and it needs the enquiry to be answered quickly at the other end. Buying more enquiries into a follow-up process that already drops them is the most expensive mistake in this whole discussion, which is why follow-up automation often earns more than extra budget does.

When buying leads is the right answer

There are real cases, and pretending otherwise would be marketing rather than advice.

• You need work this fortnight. No channel you build is faster than a platform that already has the enquiry. If the van is idle in three weeks, buy leads and build in parallel.
• You are brand new. No reviews, no site, no history. Bought leads produce jobs, jobs produce reviews, and reviews are the raw material for everything else.
• You are filling gaps rather than building a pipeline. Some firms use lead platforms as a tap: on when the diary thins, off when it does not. As a smoothing mechanism that is perfectly rational.
• You genuinely will not manage a channel. An advertising account nobody reads drifts towards whatever is easiest for the platform to spend. If there is no appetite to run one and no budget to have it run, paying per lead is more honest than paying for a neglected account.
• You answer the phone faster than anyone. The shared model rewards response speed brutally. A firm with someone always on the phone extracts far more from it than a firm that returns calls at seven in the evening.

Running both without wasting either

Most established trade firms end up running both, and the mistake is running them as though they were the same thing. Keep them separate in three ways.

Track them separately. Bought leads and generated enquiries should be tagged at the point of arrival so you can compare close rate and job value by source rather than arguing from impressions. Our benchmarks page explains why source-level data beats a channel average every time.

Quote them differently. A shared lead knows it is one of four. A direct enquiry from your own site has usually already read your page and seen your reviews, and does not need the same defensive pricing.

Budget them differently. Bought leads are an operating cost that flexes with the diary. A channel you own is an investment with a build period, and raiding its budget every time a quiet week appears is how firms spend two years never quite getting one working. If you want the paid side handled properly while you keep the platform ticking over, that is what Google Ads management is for.

When we would be the wrong call

If your average job is worth £150, your close rate is one in six and you work a single postcode, building an owned channel is unlikely to pay for itself. The search volume is small, the profit per enquiry is thin, and a lead platform absorbing the acquisition risk on your behalf is the better structure. We would tell you that on the first call rather than three months into a retainer.

The same applies if you have no capacity to answer enquiries within the hour during working days. Generating more of them will not fix that, and we would rather you spent the money on someone to answer the phone.

If the numbers do point the other way, the conversation is short: job value, margin, close rate and area. That is enough to say whether this works before anyone builds anything. Get in touch and we will run it with you.

Common questions

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