Every trade business owner asks this, usually after a lead platform invoice or an agency pitch, and almost every answer given is a single number with no window and no context attached to it. This page gives you three real numbers from one live account, explains why they disagree with each other, and shows you how to work out the only number that matters, which is your own.
A cost per lead for trades is meaningful only alongside three things: the trade, the window it was measured over, and what a job is worth. Without those, a number is a decoration.
Take a boiler service worth £90 and a re-roof worth £11,000. A £30 lead is a disaster for the first and a bargain for the second. Now take the same business in July and in November. Same adverts, same spend, different demand. Anyone quoting you a cost per lead for trades without asking what you sell and when has told you something about themselves, not about your business.
These come from a live account we run for a timber buildings company. Meta advertising, UK, a considered purchase in the low five figures.
£764.94 of spend, 158 leads, 37,302 people reached. This is the number we quote in conversation, and it is the flattering one.
Roughly half the leads for the same money. Nothing was broken. The audience had seen the creative too many times, and that is what a stale creative looks like in a number.
We stopped it. It is on this page because a campaign that failed tells you more about the mechanics than three that worked.
Three numbers, one account, one country, one trade, and they differ by a factor of eleven. That is the honest range, and it is why we will not quote a cost per lead for trades before running anything.
It is your cost per job won, and you can work it out from two things you already know.
If ten leads produce one job, and your leads cost £10 each, that job cost you £100 to win. If your average job is £8,000 and your margin on it is 20%, you made £1,600 and spent £100. Nobody who has done that sum ever asks again whether a £10 lead is expensive.
The trap is the close rate, and it is where most trades lose the argument with themselves. A cheap lead you never ring is worth nothing. Businesses that reply inside the hour close far more of the same leads than businesses that reply the next evening, which means the fastest way to halve your cost per job is usually not to halve your cost per lead. It is to answer the phone.
Four numbers, off the top of your head, no spreadsheet needed.
Not your biggest, your average.
A percentage is fine.
If you genuinely do not know, one in five is a fair starting assumption for most trades.
A quarter of the margin is a common and comfortable answer.
Multiply job value by margin to get the profit on a job. Take the share of that you are happy to spend. Divide by the number of leads it takes you to win one. That is your ceiling per lead. Anything under it is working, and it is nearly always higher than people expect.
Run that on a £11,000 re-roof at 20% margin, a one in five close rate and a quarter of the profit as budget, and your ceiling is £110 a lead. Most trades who do this sum discover they have been turning down leads at a tenth of what they could afford.
Usually, but the bigger difference is exclusivity. A lead you generate is yours. A platform lead is often sold to several firms at once, so you are quoting against three others and competing on price. Compare cost per job won, not cost per lead.
Almost always creative fatigue. A trade audience in one county is small, and the same photograph running for three months stops working. Replacing the creative fixes more of these than changing the targeting does.
Search leads usually cost more and convert better. Paid social leads cost less and need more work. The full comparison is on our page about construction lead generation.
Send us your website, your average job value and the areas you cover. We will do the sum above with you and tell you whether paid advertising is worth it for your trade, including when it is not. Half an hour, no charge.
If you want the mechanics, that is Meta ads for trades. If you want it written for your trade, we have pages on marketing for roofing companies and on garden room marketing.
