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The secret to success buying roofing leads and roofing appointments in 2023

Updated 12/6/2022

Many owners of roofing  companies have an incorrect view that buying roofing leads is not profitable. Often this view has come about because of a negative  experience that the business owner has had buying leads. It is important to realize that this negative experience was most likely because of one of two reasons:

Reason 1:  They have bought leads from a low-quality lead vendor (usually a large affiliate network); and/ or 

Reason 2 :They have bought leads or appointments when they did not have the systems in place to work them efficiently.

When done right, buying roofing leads or appointments is, in fact, extremely profitable.

Consider the success enjoyed already by some RoofingCalculator.com customers. One contractor invested 53,000 in leads in their first month and sold 2.78 million in roof replacement projects from those leads.

Whilst we are only new at selling roofing leads our model for generating and selling roofing leads is the same as we use in our sister company, SolarReviews which  is the largest and most successful supplier of leads to the residential solar industry. In 2021, SolarReviews  saw two of its lead buyers,  that started as small solar buyers several years earlier,  sell for a combined value of nearly $1 billion. 

During 2022 several others have received valuations of over $100 million during acquisitions or VC funding rounds.

Their secret to success was simple: these solar companies could regularly acquire customers at a profitable cost of acquisition because SolarReviews was driving their customer acquisition.

On average SolarReviews customers generate $6-$8 of gross margin for every dollar they spend with SolarReviews  on either solar leads or appointments. Roofing Calculator can generate the same results for your roofing business. You can run the numbers to work out how profitable it will be for your business here.

In this article, I’ll show how you can utilize roofing leads and appointments to achieve the same levels of success. I’ll explain:

• The cost of roofing leads and appointments and how this is set by Google and Facebook
• The crucial difference between a single source lead vendor like RoofingCalculator and affiliate networks like HomeAdvisor and Modernize
• Your lead generation options as a roofing company owner
• How to spot lead fraud
• The magic source of cheap, high-quality leads (Hint: it doesn’t exist)
• What to expect when buying leads or appointments from RoofingCalculator and other genuine lead vendors

If you are a roofing company owner or manager, understanding the economics of customer acquisition and the options available is essential knowledge. Reading this article will give you a unique insight into the customer acquisition landscape for residential roofing as it exists in 2023.

How much do roofing leads and appointments cost in 2023?

Roofing leads costs vary between $55 and $180, depending on the location and the number of roofing companies they are shared with. This cost is set by roofing companies competing to bid for traffic on large platforms such as Google and Facebook.

The more companies the lead is shared with, the less each company will pay. Some lead vendors do not even tell their clients how many other roofing companies each lead is sold too.

RoofingCalculator leads are sold to between 1 and 4 roofing companies. We allow the consumer to decide how many quotes they want. On average, Roofing Calculator leads are sold to two roofing companies only.

If you want to see the specific price of roofing leads or appointments  in your area you can set up an account through the registration link above or schedule a demonstration with one of our account managers, also through the link above.

I have included a discussion about the cost of appointments further below in this article.

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Why are RoofingCalculator leads better quality than leads from other vendors?

There are several reasons why RoofingCalculator leads and appointments are higher quality than the mainstream lead generation services that have operated for the last 5 to 10 years in the roofing industry.

Reason 1 RoofingCalculator generates all of its own leads 

Most of the largest suppliers of roofing leads are affiliate networks such as HomeAdvisor, Modernize and Networx. Whilst these networks do generate some of their own leads they buy most of their leads in from hundreds of third party affiliates. 

In this model it is impossible to control quality because each affiliate has an incentive to produce the greatest number of leads possible at the lowest cost. In lead generation the way to do this is to use more and more spammy ads or to try and resell old leads. Those that run these affiliate networks probably attempt to control quality and eliminate the lowest quality affiliates but it is impossible to do it because the tactics these affiliates use to generate leads can change daily.

The only way to get consistent quality to to generate all of the leads you sell to customers yourself. This is what we do at RoofingCalculator, Fixr and SolarReviews. We are a single source lead supplier offering consistent quality. Our ad text and call to action processes do not change.

Thes second reason that RoofingCalculator leads are such high quality is that we use  an incredibly high-quality verification process in. Only 48% of the raw leads generated on our websites  pass QA and are sold as leads or appointments. 

There are also a number of other reasons why RoofingCalculator leads far surpass the quality of leads from other vendors:

• We require consumers to verify that their phone number is correct by having them enter a specific pin sent to their phone to see their online estimate. If they do not confirm their phone number, they are not sold as a lead unless they are further qualified by a manual phone call.
• We provide a high-quality online estimate to consumers. Those who have tried to copy our ads and call to action promise the same but deliver no online estimate to customers.

Some roofing company owners have tried both RoofingCalculator leads and generating their own leads using Adwords. 

Many initially concluded that they could generate leads themselves for the same price.However, they noticed their cost of acquisition was higher with self-generated leads. 

Roofing company owners realized they needed to generate two raw leads to  equate to one RoofingCalculator quality lead. 

When they instead look at cost per appointment and cost for sale, it’s clear that buying RoofingCalculator.com leads generates a significantly lower cost of acquisition compared to running your own Adwords account and this is without even taking into consideration the cost of hiring a good Adwords person to manage your account..

Are roofing leads and appointments worth the high price?

Absolutely. As stated above, for every dollar a RoofingCalculator customer spends on leads or appointments, they will generate between $6-$8 of gross margin. This means you could see a 600% to 800% return on your investment. If you’re not buying roofing leads by now, you’re missing out on an incredible opportunity to take your business to the next level.

Our roofing leads profitability calculator allows you to enter your cost per lead or appointment, your conversion percentage from lead/appointment to sale, and the metrics of how profitable jobs are for you. This includes the average job size, selling price, and cost of labor and materials.

Let’s take a look at a snapshot of a live dashboard of one of our smaller clients in California:

Let's follow the math. They bought 92 leads and won eight jobs. That is a conversion percentage of 8.6%. This is a little above average, as normal conversion rates from lead to sale are around 6%.

This installer has an average job size of 3000 square feet and an average gross margin of $4 per square foot. They sell at $7.00 per square foot, and their labor and material costs total $3.00 per square foot. 

So, they have generated eight jobs with a total value of $168,000 and a gross margin of $96,000.

Even though approximately 18 of the 20 leads this company purchased did not buy a new roof from them, they still made a 10x return on their lead spend.

Why can RoofingCalculator generate a cost per acquisition from Google Ads and Facebook at a lower cost than you can?

Many of the leads and appointments sold by RoofingCalculator are generated via Google Ads and Facebook.

While you can set up traffic-buying accounts on these platforms relatively easily, it’s unlikely that you’ll achieve the same cost per lead or cost per sale as we do. This is because:

• We have a large amount of organic traffic. RoofingCalculator.com and Fixr.com  generate approximately 8 million organic visitors annually. This allows us to run our paid traffic business at a very low margin.
• We offer the consumer a choice of how many quotes they want. When they select two, three, or four, we can share the cost of generating this lead over multiple roofing companies, allowing each company to pay less. If you buy traffic directly, you might think that the leads are exclusive to you, however, consumers will often also visit other websites for competing  quotes. So, the “exclusive lead” you get when you buy traffic directly often isn't all that exclusive.
• It is not always possible to hire competent resources to manage paid traffic yourself. Many self-anointed Google Ads experts will know enough to convince you they are an expert, but not enough to actually do the job well. We are fortunate to have platform-specific experts who are among the world's best at managing a specialized advertising budget on platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, Youtube etc.
• Google and Facebook are becoming complex applications, making it harder for one team to manage spending across multiple platforms. 

How to find high-quality roofing leads for cheap (hint: you can't)

There is no cheap, high-quality, and high-volume source of roofing leads. Period.

It might be possible to generate a low volume of low-cost local leads from referrals, but volume and quality can only be obtained from larger platforms.

Large platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, YouTube, Outbrain, Taboola, and others own the consumer and sell the traffic to the highest bidder. They are aggressively making it harder to generate organic leads from their platforms. In many Google search engine result pages,( SERPs), only ads are above the fold, and you have to scroll down to see any organic content at all.

Unfortunately, this means paying for clicks is the only way to get a reasonable volume of leads from these platforms.

A lead generation company like RoofingCalculator is performing this traffic-buying function for you because we can do it more efficiently. 

We spend money on journalists to generate organic roofing leads and use paid traffic to generate additional volume.

Why you haven’t succeeded with roofing leads in the past

There are two reasons why you may not have succeeded with roofing leads previously:

• You’ve been buying leads from fraudulent lead vendors or affiliate networks; or
• Your follow-up process has been inefficient.

It is a prerequisite to success with lead buying that you are not dealing with a fraudulent lead vendor. Here is a link to an article where I discuss tips to recognizing fraudulent lead vendors.Whilst this article was written about solar leads it equally applies to roofing leads.

It is incredibly competitive to take even a good roofing lead and convert it into a sale. Automated CRMs are essential to the roofing lead sales process. The best roofing sales organizations are calling leads back almost immediately. Manual systems cannot compete with automated CRMs or dialing systems, and we highly recommend that companies invest in this specific infrastructure. 

Many roofing company owners believe they have the personnel to work leads effectively. The reality is that most often they don’t.

In almost every case where clients have complained about their low conversion rates, we have tested the companies follow up process and found that these companies do not call leads for hours, and only call leads once or twice. This is not an acceptable follow up process.

Other companies burn leads because they have poorly-trained people making the initial calls to consumers or have very inflexible sales models where they will only answer questions if the consumer agrees to an in-home appointment. Your RoofingCalculator account manager can offer advice on setting up your follow-up process.Use the link above to schedule a demo.

What contact rate can you expect from roofing leads?

With RoofingCalculator leads, you will generally get a contact rate of 80% if you call the consumer immediately and regularly over the first few hours after the lead is generated.

Unfortunately, you can’t return the 20% of leads you don’t contact. Just as Google will not refund us for the 12 clicks we bought to generate that lead, you cannot return a lead that does not answer their phone.

When a lead falls through, it’s natural to be upset – you may even want to throw in the towel on buying leads completely. However, we would advise you to stick with it. Remember, even selling just one lead out of 20 purchased will make an 800% return on your lead investment. Focus on the fact that one lead out of every 20 turns an $80 purchase into  $9,000 margin – and that lead is coming. Be patient!

An emotional overreaction to a string of bad leads is a very common reason that roofing companies quit lead buying prematurely and never become large companies.

Drop-off rates are an unfortunate reality when it comes to lead buying. Even with the most honest and high-quality lead vendors, like RoofingCalculator,  there will always be many more leads that fail than convert.

What is the conversion rate from leads to set appointments?

The conversion rate of RoofingCalculator leads to appointment, with a best practice follow-up, averages around 33% nationally.

Should I buy roofing appointments rather than roofing leads?

Many family-owned roofing companies want to avoid investing time and cost into a sales infrastructure like the one we have mentioned above to rapidly and repeatedly follow up leads. These companies are far better to buy appointments rather than leads.

Smaller, owner-operated roofing companies are at a disadvantage when it comes to chasing up leads quickly. However, they are at an advantage once they are in the home with the customer. 

Owner-operated companies are typically local, and the salesperson generally has a much broader range of knowledge than a salesperson for a larger, more corporate company.

This is why we often recommend that owner operated companies buy appointments rather than leads.

The appointments cost more but they yield a lower cost of acquisition and give the company a way to grow even before they have a complex CRM and dialer set up.

How does the cost of roofing appointments compare to the cost of roofing leads?

Roofing appointments are between three and four times more expensive than roofing leads. This is because it takes three leads to generate an appointment. In the process of trying to press the consumer to make an appointment, you generally disqualify two out of three leads. These disqualified leads do not earn any revenue. However, the clicks from Google or Facebook that generated these leads still need to be paid for and are reflected in the cost of appointments.

How much do roofing appointments cost?

Roofing appointments usually cost between $200-$500, depending on the location and the number of set appointments. Once you’ve set up your account, the cost of appointments in your area can be found in your RoofingCalculator or Fixr dashboard.

We only set either one or two appointments per consumer. This is because the no-show and cancellation rate is too high when more than two appointments are set.

Generally between 30-50 clicks need to be purchased from Google or Facebook  to generate just one in-home appointment. With a cost per click in Google Ads costing around $8, this can equate to $200-$300 worth of traffic. Then, there is also the time to follow up on each lead to find the appointment-ready customer that adds to the cost. Despite this cost they can still be very profitable.

Are there different types of roofing appointments?

Yes! RoofingCalculator and Fixr offer both in-home roofing appointments and pre-set virtual roofing appointments. Virtual appointments are generally a lower cost compared to in-home appointments. Ultimately, it is the consumer's choice which they prefer. We are then guided by the consumer’s selection, the type of appointment that best fits their needs, and how many appointments they want to schedule.