Roofing cost per lead vs cost per booked inspection
The number on the agency report
Cost per lead is the number on the marketing report because it is the number the agency can control. Spend divided by leads. Clean, monthly, and close to useless for deciding whether the money was well spent.
The sales team does not eat leads. It eats inspections that happened, with a homeowner present and a ladder on the truck. Between the lead and that inspection sit two conversion steps, and neither belongs to marketing. Cost per lead measures the agency. Cost per booked inspection measures the company.
From click to lead
Start where the money leaves. LocaliQ's 2025 search advertising benchmarks put the average roofing cost per click at $10.70. As an illustration, if 1 in 20 of those clicks turns into a call or a form, a lead costs about $214 before anyone in the office has touched it. Your ratio will differ by market and by season, but the shape holds: A roofing lead is expensive by the time it exists.
That is why the two steps after it matter. Each point of conversion lost between lead and inspection is lost on top of $200-plus that has already been paid and cannot be refunded.
The two multipliers the office owns
The first is contact and set rate: Of the leads that came in, how many did the office reach, and how many of those agreed to an inspection date? The second is show rate: Of the inspections set, how many happened with the homeowner home and ready?
Multiply the two and you get the share of paid leads that became real inspections. Divide spend by that count and you have the number that belongs on the wall. Here is the same month run twice, as an illustration, for an operator spending $20,000 to buy 100 leads.
Step | Office A | Office B |
|---|---|---|
Leads bought | 100 | 100 |
Contact and set rate | 40% | 50% |
Inspections set | 40 | 50 |
Show rate | 70% | 80% |
Inspections completed | 28 | 40 |
Cost per lead | $200 | $200 |
Cost per booked inspection | $714 | $500 |
Same agency, same spend, same cost per lead. Office B runs 12 more inspections a month on zero additional marketing dollars. Its cost per completed inspection is 30% lower, and nobody in marketing changed a thing. Ten points of set rate and ten points of show rate did all of it.
Why storm months lie
Blended annual cost per lead is where roofing marketing math goes wrong. A hail event drops cost per lead for the month because demand floods in and clicks convert on their own. In the same month, contact and set rate falls because the office is buried and the phone rings past the desk. Cheap leads, expensive inspections.
Then the retail months return, cost per lead climbs back, and the agency report looks like the marketing got worse. It did not. The mix changed. Run cost per booked inspection month by month, and tag storm months apart from retail months, or the surge will hide a set-rate problem for the other nine months of the year.
Exclusive leads through the same lens
The exclusive-versus-shared lead debate is a cost per lead argument in disguise. A shared lead at half the price looks like a bargain until you run the multipliers. If that lead is sold to four roofers and the homeowner books the first one to call, the set rate on that source is a fraction of the exclusive source, and the price advantage vanishes at the inspection line.
Judge each lead source by its cost per booked inspection, tracked per source in your CRM. Some shared sources survive that test. Most do not, and the ones that do survive only when the office reaches them first.
Put the multipliers on the report
Roofing Contractor's 2026 State of the Industry found 78% of contractors expect sales to rise this year, while 36% name a shortage of qualified labor as a top concern. Growth without labor means the office will not grow in step with the lead count, so the two multipliers have to come from process, not from headcount.
Metric | Formula | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
Cost per lead | Spend divided by leads | Marketing |
Contact and set rate | Inspections set divided by leads | Office |
Show rate | Inspections completed divided by inspections set | Office |
Cost per booked inspection | Spend divided by inspections completed | Both |
Set rate moves fastest on the leads that arrive when nobody can take them. A form at 10 PM that waits until morning has usually reached another roofer, and a call that lands while both CSRs are on the line has a set rate of zero until someone gets to it. Whether you fix that with a setter on the after-hours line, a tighter callback protocol, or an AI intake layer that answers, qualifies, and books while the desk is full, the report tells you whether it worked.
If cost per booked inspection is falling while cost per lead is flat, the office is winning. If both are flat, the problem was never the agency.
What is a good cost per lead for roofing?
There is no single good number, because cost per lead depends on your market, the season, and how many clicks it takes to produce a call or form. LocaliQ's 2025 benchmarks put the average roofing cost per click at $10.70, so a lead often costs a few hundred dollars before the office touches it. Judge it against cost per booked inspection instead, since a cheap lead the office never reaches is the most expensive lead you own.
What is cost per appointment in roofing?
Cost per appointment is total marketing spend divided by the inspections that actually happened, with the homeowner present, in the same period. It sits downstream of cost per lead and captures the two conversion steps the office controls: How many leads were contacted and set, and how many set inspections were kept. Track it monthly and per lead source, and separate storm months from retail months so a surge does not mask a weak set rate.
What is a good appointment set rate for roofers?
Set rate is inspections set divided by leads received, and the useful benchmark is your own trend per lead source rather than a published average. It rises when leads are contacted within minutes instead of hours, when the office offers two specific slots rather than asking when works, and when after-hours forms and missed calls get a response the same evening. If your set rate drops during storm months, the constraint is desk capacity, not lead quality.
Are exclusive roofing leads worth the higher price?
Only if they win on cost per booked inspection, not on cost per lead. A shared lead sold to several roofers goes to whoever calls first, so its set rate is often a fraction of an exclusive lead's, and the lower price disappears once you divide spend by completed inspections. Track each source separately in your CRM for a full quarter, then compare cost per inspection and close rate side by side before renewing either contract.
How do you calculate roofing customer acquisition cost?
Take all marketing and sales spend for a period, including lead purchases, ad management fees, and setter or CSR time spent on leads, and divide by the number of roofs sold in that period. To see where the cost comes from, break it into cost per lead, contact and set rate, show rate, and close rate. Most roofing operators find the office multipliers move the total more than any change to media spend.
About Revin
Turn paid roofing leads into booked inspections
Revin answers and qualifies every roofing lead the moment it arrives and books the inspection directly into your CRM.
