What Contractors Actually Pay for Leads

The roughly seventy dollar figure is an average across Atlantic Media Company's client base, blended across Google and Meta, and it measures ad spend only, not a management fee layered on top. A single account can land above or below it depending on the trade, the market, and the offer. It is not a floor or a ceiling for any one client, it is a reference point.

The sunroom-specific figures measure something different: cost per quote sent, meaning what it actually costs to reach a completed sales conversation that produces a real proposal, not just a name and a phone number. That runs around one hundred fifty dollars in the sunroom industry, and has been driven as low as seventy five dollars for clients whose own sales process is genuinely strong on the receiving end. Seventy five dollars is the floor reached by a strong process, not a number to expect from day one.

Here is the honest point most lead-cost conversations skip: a number you are quoted anywhere is close to meaningless until you know its scope. What platform generated it. What vertical it applies to. Whether it is a raw contact or an actual qualified prospect. Whether it is exclusive to you or shared with several other contractors. Strip any of that away and the figure stops being a benchmark and starts being a guess.

Two accounts can post the identical cost per lead and produce wildly different outcomes, because one account's leads convert into quotes and sales and the other's do not. A lower cost per lead bought by widening targeting, or by leaning on autofilled forms that let stale contact data through, usually buys worse leads, so cost per quote and cost per sale climb even while cost per lead looks like it is falling. The number on the ad platform's dashboard and the number that actually predicts revenue are not the same number.

The proof is in what actually converted, not in what looked cheapest. Probuilt Pool & Patio, across calendar year 2025 on Meta, turned roughly twenty eight thousand dollars in ad spend into four hundred thousand dollars or more in direct revenue, a sixteen to one media return, a figure that only exists because those leads became real jobs, not because any individual lead was inexpensive. NJ Sunroom Additions, in its first two months with us, signed one hundred fifty thousand dollars in sunroom projects on about five hundred dollars a month in Meta ad spend, a forty times or better all-in return. Sleepy Creek Sunrooms, in its first few months, produced a single eighty one thousand, eight hundred seventy one dollar signed sunroom project on about forty three hundred dollars in Meta spend, roughly a ten times all-in return, from a channel a prior agency could not make work for them.

Notice the two different framings in those numbers, because the distinction matters. Probuilt's sixteen to one is a media-only return, revenue divided by ad spend alone. NJ Sunroom Additions' forty times and Sleepy Creek's ten times are all-in returns, revenue divided by ad spend plus the management fee. Never compare one framing against the other's cost base, they are answering different questions. What all three share is the actual point: every one of these is a cost-per-sale story, not a cost-per-lead story. Ask your own agency for cost per quote and cost per sale, not just cost per lead. An agency that only ever reports the cheapest number in the funnel may be reporting the one number that flatters the account regardless of what it actually produced.

Results vary and depend on a range of factors. The results described here reflect specific client engagements and are not a guarantee or promise of future performance. Atlantic Media Company does not guarantee that any prospective client will achieve similar or comparable results. You can read the fuller story behind these numbers on our case studies page.

For an outdoor-living contractor, the ad spend on a dead or unqualified lead is the smallest part of what it costs you. The real costs are your sales team's hours spent chasing a homeowner who wanted a three thousand dollar patio umbrella when you sell sixty thousand dollar additions, the pipeline gap that leaves your crews under-booked next quarter, and the appointment slot a genuine buyer never got because your closer was busy dialing a dead number instead.

Frame it against the size of what you actually sell. A sunroom, a pool, or a full outdoor-living build routinely runs into five figures, so one wasted lead slot in this trade is not a rounding error, it is a real project you never got to quote. The signed projects behind the numbers in the section above, seventy four and seventy six thousand dollar sunrooms, an eighty one thousand, eight hundred seventy one dollar sunroom, are the other side of that same coin: one appointment worked well is often the entire return on a month of ad spend.

This is exactly why a cheaper lead that eats your closer's time is not actually cheaper. The math that matters in high-ticket outdoor-living work is never just what the lead cost to generate. It is what it cost you when it did not turn into the job it should have.

Lead marketplaces typically sell records for somewhere around eighteen to forty five dollars each, and that low price is possible for a specific reason: the same record is sold to several contractors at once, so part of what you are actually paying for is the right to race your competitors to the phone on a homeowner who filled out one form. Tie that back to the metric argument above and the math gets uncomfortable fast. A twenty five dollar shared lead with a low quote rate and a bidding war attached can carry a far higher cost per sale than a seventy dollar exclusive lead your sales team can actually work without racing anyone.

When you own the campaign instead of buying the record, the economics invert. In its first four months with us, Deluxe Pool Services LLC closed two pool-renovation jobs, both with paid deposits, from the first ten leads its own Meta campaign generated, a hit rate a shared marketplace record almost never produces, precisely because the lead was exclusive to Deluxe from the moment it existed. That is also why we build clients their own funnels rather than pointing traffic at a shared page: Probuilt Pool & Patio's split-tested landing pages convert at six percent or better, a rate you get by owning the page and the traffic, not by buying a record several other contractors also bought.

To be direct about where we stand in all of this: we do not sell leads. We build and run campaigns that the contractor owns, which is exactly why our numbers above are exclusive-campaign economics, not marketplace economics. If you want the fuller breakdown of what exclusive versus shared actually means and why the difference matters, we have written about that separately.