Key takeaways
- 1The invoice price of a lead tells you almost nothing. The number that matters is cost per instruction: what you pay, divided by the jobs you actually win.
- 2Shared leads carry a hidden cost: you're racing four other firms to the same phone number, so your conversion rate does the suffering.
- 3Three numbers decide everything: cost per enquiry, enquiry-to-instruction rate, and average fee. Track all three or you're guessing.
- 4Exclusive enquiries from your own pages usually cost more per lead and less per instruction. That's the whole argument.
Ask ten surveying firms what a lead costs and you’ll get ten invoice prices. Ask what an instruction costs and the room goes quiet. That second number is the one your business actually runs on, and most firms have never worked it out.
The invoice price is the least interesting number
A shared lead from a comparison site looks cheap on paper. But it’s sold to you and several competitors at once, and the homeowner has usually filled in one form with no idea who any of you are. You’re not buying a client. You’re buying a place in a queue.
So the firm that wins that job is rarely the best surveyor. It’s the one who called back in four minutes rather than four hours. If you can’t consistently be that firm, a good chunk of what you spend on shared leads is a donation to whoever can.
The three numbers that actually matter
Strip the noise away and your pipeline runs on three figures:
- Cost per enquiry. Everything you spend on a channel in a month, divided by the enquiries it produced. Not clicks. Enquiries.
- Enquiry-to-instruction rate. Of those enquiries, how many became booked jobs? This is where shared and exclusive leads part company.
- Average fee. What an instruction is worth to you, by survey type. A Level 3 on a period property is not a Level 2 on a flat.
Put them together and you get cost per instruction. As an illustration: say a channel gives you enquiries at £30 each and you convert one in five. Your instructions cost £150. A “cheaper” channel at £18 an enquiry where you convert one in twelve is costing you £216 a job, plus the hours your team spent chasing the other eleven. The cheap channel is the expensive one.
You don’t have a lead cost problem. You have a conversion visibility problem.
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Why exclusive beats cheap
An enquiry from your own landing page behaves differently. The homeowner searched for the thing you do, read a page about exactly that service, and chose to contact you by name. There’s no race because there’s no queue. Nobody else got the lead.
That intent shows up everywhere downstream: they answer the phone, they’ve usually got the property details ready, and they’re comparing you against doing nothing rather than against four rivals. Exclusive enquiries tend to cost more per lead and convert at a rate that makes the comparison-site maths look silly.
How to find your number
Three moves, in order:
- Track attribution properly. Every enquiry should carry its source with it: which campaign, which page, which search. If your tracking can’t trace an instruction back to the click that started it, fix that before spending another pound.
- Make your forms do the qualifying. A two-stage quotation form that captures property type, value, location and timescale hands you everything you need to price the job, and quietly filters out the work you don’t want.
- Answer fast. Whatever your channel mix, response speed is the cheapest conversion upgrade there is. Minutes, not hours.
What good looks like
When the whole system is built this way, the first months speak for themselves. These are first-month enquiry counts from three of our surveying clients, each with their own pages, their own campaigns and their own tracking:
Every one of those enquiries was exclusive, tracked to its source, and answered by the firm that owns the pipeline. That’s the difference between buying leads and building an asset.
What would your version cost? Honest answer: it’s bespoke, because your fees, your patch and your capacity aren’t anyone else’s. The brief takes two minutes and gets you a real number.
