Is buying leads worth it for a contractor?

If you run a trade business, you have probably paid for leads. A site sends you a name, a number and a job, and charges you for it. It feels simple: pay for a lead, win a job.

The price on the label is not what the job costs you. Here is how to work out what it really is.

The same customer is sold more than once

When a homeowner fills in a request on a lead site, that request is not sent to one business. It is typically sold to three to eight of them. Every one of you pays for the contact. One of you gets the job.

So before you have picked up the phone, you are in a race with several competitors who all paid for the same person — and the homeowner's phone is ringing off the hook.

You pay whether you win or not

This is the part that changes the maths. You are not charged for a job. You are charged for a chance at a job.

Work it out for your own business:

1. Take what you paid for leads last month.
2. Divide it by the number of jobs those leads actually turned into.

That is your real cost for one customer. For most businesses buying shared leads, it comes out at four to seven times the price of a single lead — because you paid for all the ones you lost as well.

A lead priced at what looks like a fair number is only fair if you win every one. Nobody does.

What it does to your prices

When a customer costs that much to win, one of two things happens. Either your margin disappears, or you raise your prices to cover it — and become the expensive quote in a race against people who paid the same for the same lead.

The alternative is your own ads

An ad you run yourself reaches a customer who is looking for what you do, in the area you cover, and when they call, they are calling you — not you and seven others.

The reason most trades do not do this is not the cost. It is that running ads properly is a second job: choosing what to promote, who to show it to, which words, which picture, how much a day, and whether any of it is working. That is what agencies charge for, usually before a single ad has run.

This is the job Camorna does. It builds the ads from your own business, shows you the proposal, and waits for you to approve it. You do not touch an ad manager. When the phone rings, you can see which ad made it ring.

How to decide

Do the sum above first. If your real cost per won job is comfortable, keep going. If it made you wince, it is worth running your own ads alongside for a month and comparing the two numbers side by side. The one that wins customers for less is the one to keep.

Sources: shared-lead resale and effective cost per booked job; 2025–26 PPC pricing guides.