Vendors use one word for three different products, each with its own price and its own way of failing. Here's what sets them apart, what market pricing says about each, and the one version no vendor can sell you.
A shared roofing lead is one homeowner inquiry resold to several contractors, so the first roofer to reach the phone usually wins and the conversation starts as a price war. Exclusive is the alternative, but the word can mean any of these three.
The vendor sends the lead to one contractor: you. This is the real product behind the premium price. The homeowner still filled out a generic quote form on the vendor's site, so intent varies, but at least nobody else is dialing them.
Some offers are exclusive only for a window, or only within the vendor's own network, and the contact may be resold later as an aged lead. Ask directly whether the record is ever resold, in any form, at any time, and get the answer in the contract.
The lead comes from your own Google Ads account, off your own ad, onto your own landing page. The homeowner chose your company before they ever spoke to you. No vendor can sell this version, because it only exists when you own the account.
Ask who owns the data and what the advertising optimizes on. A vendor's machine optimizes form fills across its whole network. Your machine optimizes your sold jobs, because it is wired to your CRM and nothing else.
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Request a Discovery Call →Vendor-published 2026 figures put shared roofing leads at roughly $25 to $200 and exclusive leads at roughly $40 to $550, with exclusive typically costing 25 to 50 percent more than shared. Read the premium as information: it is the market's own estimate of how much value resale destroys.
The premium only pays if your close rate moves with it. An exclusive lead that closes at twice the rate of a shared one is cheaper per sold job even at a much higher sticker price, and the reverse is also true. Divide any quoted price by your real close rate before comparing tiers, and hold the result against the job's value.
"Cost per lead is irrelevant. What matters is cost per job sold," says Juan Colicchio, founder of LGG Media, which runs Google Ads for a roofing company and for private-equity-owned roofing groups at a minimum 10 to 1 return on ad spend: at most $2,000 of acquisition cost on a $20,000 roof.
That ratio is only enforceable on an account you own, because it requires the sold job and its dollar value to flow back into bidding. The mechanics are documented by Google: offline conversion imports match each sold job to the click that produced it, and Target ROAS bidding then spends toward searches likely to produce job value at the ratio you set. The bidding events are chosen because they cannot be faked: a demo completed and a job sold. Form fills and raw calls can be gamed, and an algorithm fed gameable events buys junk at scale.
How offline conversion tracking works → · Value-based bidding: thresholds and setup →
Below roughly $500 per day of Google Search budget, your account cannot accumulate the conversion data that value-based bidding needs, and a lead package is a defensible way to keep crews busy. Above that line, Juan Colicchio does not recommend buying roofing leads at all.
If you buy, buy like an operator. Demand a written and automatic credit policy for bogus contacts, confirm how exclusivity is enforced, and hold the vendor to the same 10 to 1 return you would demand of your own campaigns, measured on jobs sold in your CRM.
A shared lead opens with a homeowner who has four quotes coming and a spreadsheet ready. The conversation starts on price because price is the only variable the format allows. An exclusive lead opens with a homeowner talking to one company, so the conversation can start on the roof: the damage, the timeline, the materials, the crew. Salespeople close more of the second kind for reasons that have nothing to do with skill.
Other verticals put a number on this. In auto transport, where vendors publish full price ladders, the market prices a lead sold to one buyer at 7 to 16 times the price of a lead sold to ten desks. Roofing vendors publish a smaller premium, 25 to 50 percent, partly because roofing exclusivity usually caps resale rather than eliminating the generic quote form the lead was born on. The homeowner who clicked your ad and landed on your brand never entered that funnel at all, which is why the truly exclusive version closes best and is not for sale.
The exclusivity price ladder, documented in auto transport →
A vendor-exclusive lead is sold to one contractor instead of several. A truly exclusive lead never passes through a vendor at all: it comes from your own ad account, off your own ad, onto your own branded page. The second kind carries higher intent, because the homeowner chose your company before the first conversation.
Vendor-published 2026 figures show exclusive leads typically costing 25 to 50 percent more than shared, with published ranges of roughly $40 to $550 exclusive against $25 to $200 shared. Whether the premium pays depends on your close rate per tier, measured in your own CRM.
Often, because no other contractor is calling the same homeowner. The answer comes from arithmetic: divide each tier's price by your close rate on that tier and compare cost per sold job. If you cannot measure close rate by lead source, fix that before buying anything.
Owning the machine. Ads on your own account, with demos completed and jobs sold flowing back as conversion values, produce leads no vendor can resell and train the bidding on revenue instead of form fills. LGG's roofing accounts run this at a minimum 10 to 1 return target for contractors spending $100,000 or more per month.
Pricing and premium figures: 99 Calls, Roofing Lead Generation Costs in 2026, retrieved September 2026. Platform mechanics: Google Ads Help, About offline conversion imports and About Target ROAS bidding. Operator guidance is from LGG Media's active roofing accounts and is labeled as such.
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