PPC Advertising Agency for Solar Companies

Solar has the most confusing acquisition market in home services, because at least five different products are sold under the word lead and the reported prices span two orders of magnitude. A shared web form goes for a few dollars. An exclusive lead runs into the hundreds. A booked appointment can cost several hundred more, and reported no-show rates on those appointments still run thirty to forty percent. None of those vendors are lying about their pricing. They are selling different things at different points in a funnel, and an installer comparing them on cost per lead is comparing numbers that do not describe the same event. The only figure that resolves it is cost per closed install, and it is the one almost nobody calculates.

1The Solar Lead Taxonomy

• Shared leads are a speed contest. Your conversion reflects how fast you call rather than how good your process is.
• Booked appointments are not booked outcomes. The reported no-show rate means an appointment price should be divided by the hold rate before comparing anything.
• Aged leads only work with commitment. They require systematic repeated working over months to produce anything.
• Every product needs its own economics. Never a blended cost per lead across vendor types.

The comparison problem is worse than it looks, because vendors quote the number that flatters their product. A marketplace selling shared leads quotes cost per lead. An appointment setter quotes cost per appointment. A canvassing firm quotes cost per sit. Each is technically accurate and none is comparable to the others, which is how an installer ends up with four active sources and no idea which is funding the business and which is consuming it.

2Cost Per Closed Install

Build this calculation once per source and the entire allocation question resolves itself.

1. Cost per lead. What you actually paid, including management fees and labour for canvassing.
2. Contact rate. What share you reached at all, which collapses quickly on shared and aged leads.
3. Qualification rate. Homeowner, suitable roof, adequate bill, in area.
4. Appointment hold rate. Where purchased appointments lose a third or more before anyone sits down.
5. Proposal to signature rate. Your sales performance, which should be similar across sources if lead quality is similar and rarely is.
6. Cancellation rate. Solar has meaningful post-signature cancellation, and counting signatures overstates revenue.
7. Cost per closed install. The product of all of it, and the only number that compares a ten dollar aged lead against a six hundred dollar appointment honestly.

• Reported figures span a wide range. Published estimates put cost per closed install through shared marketplaces well into four figures, with owned channels varying substantially by market and management.
• Compare against system margin, not revenue. On systems reported around thirty thousand dollars, the acquisition figure needs to sit against gross margin to mean anything.

3Owned Channels Against Purchased Leads

• Purchased leads are fast and rented. They produce volume immediately and stop the day you stop paying, with no accumulated asset.
• Owned channels compound. Reviews, rankings, and profile presence keep working, which matters more in a contracting market.
• Reported Local Service Ads economics are strong. Roughly half the cost per lead of search and a much lower cost per closed customer, which makes it the first place to look.
• Purchased leads suit specific situations. Filling a sales team's capacity gap, entering a new market, or covering a seasonal trough.
• The substitution risk is real. Installers who rely on vendors never build the review base and local presence that make cheaper channels work, and then cannot leave.
• Track them completely separately. Blending purchased and owned performance obscures which is actually funding the business.
• Understand the sourcing. Some lead generation practices in this industry create expectations your consultant then has to unwind.

4Channel Order for Solar

1. Local Service Ads. Reported best economics available, and underused across the industry.
2. Business Profile and reviews. Free, and it drives the channel above.
3. Branded search. Cheapest conversions in any account and essential given how many competitors bid on installer names.
4. Search on installer and quote intent. Qualified, expensive, and worth it with proper filtering.
5. Retargeting. Given a decision cycle measured in months and a large stock of unsigned proposals.
6. Social demand generation. Weighted more heavily in solar than in trades because search cannot expand the funnel.
7. Referral and customer programmes. Cheapest qualified prospects available anywhere.
8. Purchased leads. Last, selectively, and measured on closed installs.

5What Each Budget Level Supports

Reported click costs in competitive solar markets are high enough that a small search budget produces very little learnable data, which is a strong argument for concentrating early spend into Local Service Ads and review building rather than spreading it thinly across channels.

6Sales Capacity Is the Constraint

• Solar consultations are expensive to deliver. An hour or more of a commissioned consultant's time, frequently in the customer's home.
• Which makes unqualified appointments costly twice. You paid for the lead and you consumed selling time that produced nothing.
• Calculate your consultation cost. Consultant time, travel, and design work, so the value of qualification becomes visible.
• Match lead volume to consultant capacity. Overfeeding a sales team produces slow follow-up, which destroys conversion on time-sensitive leads.
• Speed to contact is a capacity question. Reported patterns show contact rates collapsing within minutes on inbound solar enquiries.
• Remote consultation extends capacity. And many buyers prefer it, which makes it worth building rather than treating as a fallback.
• Do not scale spend before hiring. The classic solar failure is buying more leads than the team can work and blaming the leads.

7Responding to Policy Shifts

• Policy is the demand variable in solar. More than season, weather, or economy, which makes it the thing budgets should be built to respond to.
• Deadlines create genuine surges. Programme expiry dates produce concentrated demand that is worth spending into heavily and briefly.
• Expiries create troughs. Demand after a major incentive ends contracts sharply, as it did this year, and budgets should anticipate rather than react.
• Hold a policy reserve. Uncommitted budget available for a programme deadline or a utility rate decision.
• Utility rate cases are local demand events. And they are scheduled, which means they can be planned for.
• Update creative and keywords immediately. Advertising an expired programme wastes money and damages credibility simultaneously.
• Watch what competitors do. Some will keep advertising expired incentives, which is an opportunity to be the accurate option.

8Tracking Through the Whole Funnel

• Record source on every enquiry. At the point of capture, in the CRM, without exception, since this is the foundation of everything above.
• Track each funnel stage separately. Contact, qualification, held appointment, proposal, signature, permit, install, and activation.
• Import held appointments and signed contracts. As offline conversions, so bidding optimizes toward outcomes rather than form fills.
• Record ownership model and system value. Since revenue and margin differ substantially between cash, loan, and third-party arrangements.
• Track cancellations against signatures. Because solar cancellation is material and signature-based reporting overstates performance.
• Use long attribution windows. Months rather than weeks, matching the real decision cycle.
• Reconcile monthly against installs. Platform-reported conversions and installed systems diverge substantially in this industry.

9Measuring Paid Performance

• Cost per closed install by source. The allocation number, calculated the same way for every channel.
• Cost per held appointment. The working metric while installs lag.
• Qualification and hold rates by source. Where lead quality differences actually appear.
• Consultation time consumed per closed install. The hidden cost of poor qualification.
• Ownership model mix by source. Since margin differs materially.
• Cancellation rate by source. Some channels produce signatures that do not survive to install.
• Owned versus purchased share of installs. The strategic dependency measure.
• Total acquisition cost against gross margin. Annually, which is the check no channel report substitutes for.