Cost per Lead Is the Wrong Number. Work Out Cost per Job.
Cost per lead is what you pay a supplier. Cost per job is what pays the wages. How installers can work it out, track it and bring it down.
Installers compare lead suppliers on cost per lead because it's the number on the invoice. It's the wrong number to decide on. What pays the wages is cost per job: what you spent on leads, divided by the jobs those leads turned into.
The only way to know what a lead really cost is to follow it past the point of sale.
Our piece on the 92-to-1 spend gap follows the money from a paid click to a qualified lead. This one starts where that stops: from lead to signed job.
How do you work out cost per job?
Three rates sit between a lead and a job:
- the contact rate, the share of leads your team actually speaks to;
- the survey rate, the share of those conversations that become a survey or appointment;
- the close rate, the share of surveys that become a signed job.
Multiply them together and divide the result into the price per lead:
Cost per job = price per lead ÷ (contact rate × survey rate × close rate)
Or, at month end, divide total lead spend by jobs won. Either way, that's your cost per acquisition; the formula just shows which stage is costing you.
Here is the chain for an invented installer buying 100 leads at £30 each. The numbers are made up: not POCKLA data, not a price for any product, and not a benchmark.
| Stage (invented numbers) | Rate | Left from 100 leads | Cost per stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads bought | 100 | £30 per lead | |
| Spoken to | 60% | 60 | £50 per conversation |
| Survey booked | 40% of those | 24 | £125 per survey |
| Job signed | 25% of surveys | 6 | £500 per job |
A £30 lead is a £500 job. That is the figure to set against your margin on an install, and to compare between suppliers.
Why can a cheaper lead cost more per job?
The price is only one of four numbers in the formula. Change one, keep the rest as above, and cost per job moves:
| What changes (invented numbers) | Cost per job |
|---|---|
| Nothing: the example above | £500 |
| Contact rate rises from 60% to 75% | £400 |
| Survey rate rises from 40% to 50% | £400 |
| Lead price halves to £15, but contact rate halves to 30% | £500 |
| Lead price rises to £45, with contact at 75% and surveys at 50% | £480 |
Halving the lead price saved nothing once half as many homeowners picked up. Paying half as much again per lead still came out cheaper per job, because more of those leads became surveys.
This is arithmetic, not a prediction. Nothing here says a dearer lead will be answered more often; only your own tracking can show that. What it does show is that a cost per lead means little until you know the three rates behind it. For a worked solar example, with an indicative price range, see what solar leads cost in the UK.
Pay per click or pay per lead: who carries the risk?
Run your own ads and you pay per click; buy from a supplier and you pay per lead. The real difference is who carries the risk of wasted clicks.
| Pay per click | Pay per lead | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | every click, whether it becomes an enquiry or not | each lead that meets the agreed criteria |
| Wasted clicks | your cost | the supplier's cost |
| Control | full: keywords, audiences, pages, bids | you set criteria, area and volume; the supplier runs the campaigns |
| Data | every search term, click and form fill | what the supplier shares, so ask before you start |
| What it needs | skill, time and a budget to learn with | a written definition of a qualified lead |
| What goes wrong | spend on clicks that never enquire | leads that meet a loose definition but never become jobs |
Pay per click suits an installer with the skill and budget to run campaigns properly, but every click is paid for. Pay per lead moves that media risk to the supplier, but only if you agree in writing what a qualified lead is. If "qualified" only means "filled in a form", the risk comes straight back to you.
Neither model touches the three rates after the lead arrives. Those are yours whichever way you buy, which is why lead generation pricing never settles the question on its own.
Which levers move cost per job?
Five things move the rates in the chain.
1. Response speed
The sooner someone hears back, the more likely you are to reach them. A 2011 audit of US companies published in Harvard Business Review found that firms which tried to contact a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried an hour later. That is US data from 2011: treat it as a direction, not a benchmark for UK home improvement today. Speed mostly moves the contact rate. See speed to lead for what a useful first response looks like.
2. Qualification
A survey booked with someone outside your area, who doesn't own the home, or who wants a job you don't do is a wasted morning. Qualifying on the form and in the follow-up, against criteria agreed up front, moves the survey and close rates.
3. Exclusivity
A lead sold to several firms starts a race on speed and price. You may still win it, but you may also ring a homeowner who has already spoken to two other firms. An exclusive lead is sold once, to you.
4. Honest ads
An ad that hints at a grant fills your diary with homeowners expecting one. The ASA's advice on lead generation marketing notes rulings against ads offering "solar funding schemes" and "grants" with "Apply now" calls to action, where the advertiser couldn't show the funding was genuine and available. Honest ads may bring fewer enquiries, but fewer of your calls go on undoing a promise.
5. Call quality
Two reps given the same leads can book very different numbers of surveys. Listening back to calls shows whether a lost lead was poor or a good one that slipped: the price question nobody answered, or the partner nobody asked about.
How do you track cost per job?
Tag every lead with where it came from, and give it a status that changes as it moves.
A short status list covers most of it: needs a first call, spoken to, survey booked, call back, not interested, invalid number, won and lost. Keep it in your CRM, or in POCKLA Desk if you don't have one, and use the same status names every time. If one rep writes "no answer", another writes "NA" and a third leaves it blank, you can't work out a contact rate.
Once a month, for each supplier or campaign, divide lead spend by jobs won, then check the three rates to see where the rest dropped out.
Be honest about the limits:
- jobs take weeks to sign, so cost per job lags behind the spend that produced it;
- small numbers are noisy: in the example above, one job more or fewer moves cost per job from £500 to about £430 or £600;
- a status is only as good as the rep who sets it.
Those statuses are also what your ads should learn from, so spend follows jobs rather than form fills. Our guide to closing the lead feedback loop covers how.
Where POCKLA fits
POCKLA is built around one idea: you pay for leads, not clicks. We run our own Meta and Google campaigns, so wasted clicks are our cost, and every lead is exclusive, sold once to one buyer.
Each enquiry gets a WhatsApp message in your business's name seconds after the form, asking your questions and agreeing a call time the customer chose, or free SMS nurture with a personalised link if you prefer text. Leads go into your CRM or POCKLA Desk with every answer attached, and outcomes logged in Desk or read from your CRM go back into the campaigns. Calls made from Desk get free call analytics.
What we can't set is your close rate. That part of cost per job belongs to your team, which is why the calls are worth seeing. We agree what a qualified lead means for you on a call, with your postcodes, follow-up channel and delivery, before anything goes live.
Want to pay for leads, not clicks? See how POCKLA works →