Pay per lead / Coatings · Painting · Permanent lighting
Follow the lead.
Measure the job.
A lead source earns its place by helping you win suitable work at a cost your business can support. To judge pay per lead, follow the same group of enquiries from delivery through contact, estimates, quotes and jobs. Lead count and price alone cannot tell you the outcome.
Key takeaways
- Compare leads received in the same period and allow their estimates and quotes time to develop.
- Use explicit denominators: contacted leads, booked estimates, attended estimates and won jobs are different stages.
- Lead-source cost per won job is not the full cost of acquiring or delivering the job.
- Keep open quotes, invalid leads and confirmed losses separate.
01 / Measure your PPL results
Start with a record your team will maintain.
For every enquiry, record its source, received date, assigned owner and current status. Add successful contact, estimate booked, estimate attended, quote sent, job won or lost, and the reason when known. Use stable lead identifiers so a duplicate is not silently counted as a second opportunity.
Keep submitted replacement requests separate from confirmed replacements. Record what was billed and any actual adjustment. If you replace an invalid entry in your performance view, preserve the original issue and its linked replacement so neither disappears from the audit trail.
The free lead-to-job tracker is a starting point. A CRM can serve the same purpose. The important part is consistent records, not buying another tool.
02 / Measure your PPL results
Compare groups that have had time to mature.
Choose a received-date range and follow the leads in that group. If a lead arrived in October but closed in November, it still belongs to the October acquisition group. Separately, your cash-flow report can record when payment arrived.
Do not compare a fresh batch with a mature one and call the new batch worse simply because its estimates have not happened. Show the review date, open quotes and undecided opportunities alongside won and lost jobs.
Compare similar work where practical. Interior repainting, large exterior projects and different coating applications can involve different quoting and delivery costs. A shift in the project mix can change the results even if the lead source itself is unchanged.
03 / Measure your PPL results
Use a small set of clear calculations.
- Contact rate: unique leads successfully contacted ÷ unique leads in the review group.
- Estimate-booking rate: unique leads with an estimate booked ÷ unique leads in the review group.
- Attended-estimate close rate: won jobs ÷ attended estimates, using a consistent cohort and outcome definition.
- Lead-source cost per won job: actual lead charges for the group, after confirmed billing adjustments, ÷ jobs won from that group.
Keep the raw counts beside each rate. If no job has been won, cost per won job is not yet calculable; it is not zero. If one lead can produce multiple jobs, state that counting rule rather than silently mixing it with a one-lead-one-job report.
For LMC PPL, LMC funds advertising. Do not add a fictional ad-spend charge to your lead invoice. You still have your own staff time, tools, travel and estimating costs. Add actual acquisition expenses when assessing the fuller cost of winning business.
04 / Measure your PPL results
A fictional example: inexpensive leads can still be expensive jobs.
This arithmetic example is not LMC pricing, a client result or a forecast. Suppose a contractor pays $1,000 in total lead charges for one review group and wins two jobs. Lead-source cost per won job is $500. If the same charges ultimately produce four jobs, it is $250.
The example shows why a cost-per-lead number alone is incomplete. It does not tell you the eventual number of jobs, their size or their delivery cost. It also does not establish that either outcome is profitable.
Revenue is not profit. Review the money actually earned, the cost of labor and materials, other project expenses and the business’s overhead before deciding whether a source is commercially worthwhile. Avoid using a large unsigned quote as if it were collected revenue.
05 / Measure your PPL results
Fix the stage that is losing opportunities.
If enquiries are repeatedly outside the agreed project or service area, review the campaign scope and record the specific examples. If suitable leads are not being contacted, review assignment and follow-up. If conversations happen but estimates rarely book, inspect the offer and the next step being proposed.
If estimates happen but quotes do not convert, review project fit, quoting, sales conversations and the reasons homeowners give. That is different from a wrong-number problem. None of these observations alone proves what caused the result; use the records to narrow the question.
Change one clear issue, record the date and review a comparable group later. Keep a lead source, adjust it or pause it based on your capacity and actual outcomes—not a promised industry-wide close rate. For the billing distinctions behind the records, see validity and replacements.
Common questions.
What is a good cost per contractor lead?
There is no useful universal figure for every trade, job mix, territory and sales process. Work back from the actual costs and contribution of the jobs you can deliver, then measure your own acquisition results.
Should an unanswered lead count?
Keep it in your records with an unanswered status. A valid LMC PPL enquiry remains payable. Do not remove it from a report simply because it did not convert.
Can I use LMC’s appointment close-rate range for my PPL forecast?
No. A range reported for attended appointments has a different denominator from raw leads delivered. Use your own PPL cohort and measured stages instead.
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