Vendors charge $1.25 to $25 per inquiry, while an in-house pipeline takes months and produces prospects no one else receives. We run both sets of math with published numbers, plus what one brokerage needed starting from zero.
Lead vendors run networks of quote-comparison websites. A shipper fills out one form expecting a few prices. That submission is resold in real time to multiple brokerages, up to 10 at the published shared rates, and every desk starts dialing within minutes.
The vendors are open about the mechanics: iMover Leads publishes that each quote request is sent to 10 brokers at $1.00 to $1.25 per lead, and Auto Transport Broker Leads publishes a ladder from $2.75 shared up to $20 exclusive and $25 per live call transfer. The resale is the product. Whoever reaches the shipper first tends to win, so the shared-lead business quietly converts your marketing budget into a phone-speed contest against 9 competitors holding the identical contact.
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Request a Discovery Call →Vendor-published close rates on shared car shipping leads run 5 to 9 percent, figures the vendors report themselves, as the Super Dispatch buying guide notes.
Take the friendlier end: 1,000 shared leads at $2 costs $2,000 and closes 70 shipments at 7 percent. That is roughly $29 in lead cost per booked shipment before a dispatcher touches the phone. The number is survivable. The problem is what it cannot become. Your close rate is capped by the speed race, your volume is capped by the vendor's traffic, and every dollar you spend improves the vendor's machine instead of yours.
The alternative is generating car shipping leads from ads on your own account, where every lead is exclusive by construction. LGG Media does not buy third-party leads for clients. All leads are exclusive, generated under the client's brand, on the client's account.
The machine has three parts. First, tracking that ties every quote, booking, and dispatched load back to the click that produced it. Second, a value signal: outcomes flow from the CRM back to Google through offline conversion import, which matches each closed deal to its stored click ID. Since June 2026, Google has been migrating this path to enhanced conversions for leads via its Data Manager API, so new integrations should start there. Third, value-based bidding: with real values attached, Target ROAS bidding spends toward searches that produce revenue rather than form fills. Google's published requirement for Search campaigns is at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days, which is why this build suits brokerages with real volume rather than two-person desks.
Rather than optimizing cost per lead, the bid runs on return. "We bid on ROAS using the value of the deposit," says Juan Colicchio, founder of LGG Media. "The cost per lead could theoretically match the cost to acquire a single customer." When quality varies as much as it does in this vertical, cost per lead is the wrong unit of account. The account is judged on what a dollar of spend returns, and the algorithm is fed the numbers that decide it.
An auto transport brokerage launched in October 2025 with no CRM integration and no payment processing connection. The architecture came first: three months at $700 per day in validation spend while the tracking reached 80 percent of transactions matched to originating ad clicks.
Then the scale event ran 21 days. Spend rose from $700 to $10,000 to $12,000 per day. Daily revenue rose from $1,200 to $20,000 to $24,000. The account held a sustained 2.0x ROAS with 86 percent attribution accuracy at four months old. Every figure is published in the auto transport case study.
Three months of patience is the honest price of the build. It is also why the buy option keeps its place: leads arrive the week you sign, and no architecture is required.
If you stay on bought leads, one operational fact dominates every other. The Super Dispatch guide reports research on web-lead response timing, including an MIT lead response study of over 15,000 web leads: the odds of contacting a lead called within 5 minutes rather than 30 were up to 100 times higher, and the odds of qualifying it 21 times higher.
In a market where the same contact reaches up to 10 desks at once, the broker who dials in 60 seconds usually wins the conversation, and the broker who dials in half an hour funds everyone else's close rate. That fact cuts both ways for the buy-versus-build decision. It means a disciplined desk can outperform the vendor-published close rates without spending another dollar on leads. It also means the shared-lead model taxes you forever: the speed race never ends, because the race is the product. An exclusive lead from your own ad has no race. The shipper called you because your ad answered their search, and the first conversation belongs to you by default.
The published unit economics from our case-study account give the build side a concrete yardstick: a $450 average order value per shipment against a $350 customer acquisition cost, leaving a $100 gross margin per shipment before operating costs, at a sustained 2.0x ROAS.
Those are one brokerage's numbers on one stack, so treat them as a documented reference point rather than your forecast. The point of owning the machine is that your account converges on your economics, because the bidding trains on your CRM's deposits and dispatches rather than on a vendor's form fills.
Your spend is too low to train value bidding, you need volume this week, or your sales team is new and needs raw dials. Demand a written credit policy, ask how many brokers share each lead, and track cost per dispatched load rather than cost per lead. Fix your response time before you raise your lead budget, because the five-minute window pays better than the next thousand leads.
Your spend can train value bidding and you intend to scale. At that level the shared-lead ceiling costs more than the architecture does, and the case-study account shows what the owned version returns. Our auto transport lead generation service covers the full method, the guide to auto transport lead providers covers the vendor market, and the margin logic sits in our guide to auto transport broker leads.
Published 2026 vendor rates: shared leads run $1.00 to $2.75 per lead when resold to up to 10 brokers, $5 when limited to 4, $20 for an exclusive lead, and $25 for a live call transfer. Generating your own leads is priced differently: you pay for clicks, and the cost per acquired customer depends on your conversion path and bidding.
Mostly no. The standard product is a shared lead resold to as many as 10 brokerages at once, which the vendors state in their own published pricing. True exclusive tiers exist at 7 to 16 times the shared price. A lead generated by ads on your own account is exclusive by construction, because nobody else ever receives it.
Run search ads on your own account, store the click ID with every lead, and feed closed outcomes from your CRM back to Google with offline conversion import (or enhanced conversions for leads via the Data Manager API, the path Google now recommends for new integrations). Then use Target ROAS bidding so the algorithm optimizes toward dispatched loads and their revenue. The tracking architecture has to exist before the scale spend, or the algorithm trains on noise.
Vendors publish 5 to 9 percent for shared leads, and those figures are self-reported, so treat them as a ceiling rather than a promise. Your response speed moves the number more than the provider does, because up to 9 other brokers hold the same contact and the first call usually wins.
The documented build in our case study took three months of tracking architecture at $700 per day in validation spend, followed by a 21-day scale event to $10,000 to $12,000 per day. Four months in, the account held a 2.0x sustained ROAS with 86 percent attribution accuracy.
Vendor pricing and distribution: iMover Leads published packages and Auto Transport Broker Leads published pricing, retrieved August 2026. Market close rates and response-time research: Super Dispatch, Auto Transport Leads: Cost, Providers and ROI. Platform mechanics: Google Ads Help, About offline conversion imports and About Target ROAS bidding. Results: LGG Media auto transport case study.
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