Your $228 lead, ignored for 42 hours

Somebody's ceiling is stained. They search for a roofer, click your ad, and fill in your form. You just paid for that. Then the form sits in an inbox until Thursday.

That's the most expensive kind of silence in the trades. Here are the numbers behind it, how to measure your own, and how to get your first reply down to about a minute.

The $228 part

That figure comes from LocaliQ's 2025 benchmarks, which cover 3,211 US search campaigns that ran from April 2024 to March 2025. Roofing and gutters came out at $228.15 a lead, the highest of 16 home-service categories. The figure for home services overall was $90.92, so a roofing lead costs about two and a half times the typical one.

Two caveats. These are medians across LocaliQ's own campaigns, and yours may be better or worse. And this is Google Search only, so your Local Services or Facebook numbers will be different. Pull your real cost per lead before you do anything with this article.

The 42-hour part

The 42 hours comes from an old study, and you should know that going in.

In 2011, Harvard Business Review published an audit of 2,241 US companies. The researchers sent each one a web lead and timed the reply. As reported at the time, 37% replied within an hour, 16% within a day, and 24% took longer than a day. Another 23% never replied at all. Among companies that replied within 30 days, the average was 42 hours.

It's 15 years old and it isn't about roofers. We don't know of a solid, current figure for how fast roofing companies reply, and we won't invent one. Use it as a prompt, not a benchmark. The useful question is what your number is, and many owners don't know.

Why slow costs more in roofing

Roofing is a bad trade to be slow in, for three reasons.

The job is big. Verisk's 2026 U.S. Roof Report puts the average insured residential replacement at $17,631 in 2025, about 33% above the 2021 to 2024 average. One lost job is a lot of lost money.

The customer is shopping. In Roofing Contractor's 2026 homeowner survey, 66% said they would gather three quotes. Our reading: they'll keep calling until they have three. If you reply fourth, you may not get a look.

It's often urgent. Somebody with water coming in isn't waiting until Thursday.

Here's how that adds up.

Measure yours this week

You can do this in a morning, with no new software.

1. Submit your own form. Use a personal email, from your phone, at 7pm on a weeknight. Write down when the first reply arrives and what it says.
2. Call your own line. Try lunchtime on a Saturday. Does anyone answer? If not, what happens next?
3. Pull 30 days from your CRM. For each lead, compare the time it was created with the time of first contact. Use the median, not the average, because one lead that sat for a week will distort the average.
4. Count the zeros. How many leads never got a reply at all? This one tends to hurt the most.

If you'd rather have someone else do the mystery shopping, that's what our free Leak Report is.

Getting to 60 seconds

A fast reply doesn't have to mean a person dropping everything. It means something useful goes out right away, and a person follows up.

For a form lead, send a text or email within a minute. If someone ticked your SMS consent box, text them. If they didn't, email. A good first message has four things: who you are, what they asked about, one question, and a way to book.

That question does real work. The answer tells your team whether this is an emergency, and a reply turns a form fill into a conversation. Add one more question early on, whether it's an insurance claim or a retail job, and the right person can pick it up with the right paperwork.

Then alert a human. Put the lead in your CRM and ping whoever's on duty. If no one touches it in 15 minutes, ping someone else.

You don't need AI for this part. A form that triggers a text, plus an alert to your phone, gets you most of the way. AI starts to earn its place when the homeowner replies at 9pm with a question and someone has to answer it, qualify the job and book the visit. Our Never-Miss Lead Desk does all of that, but start with the simple version if you can.

What to track

Cost per lead is the number everyone quotes. It's not the one that pays you. Track these every week:

• Median time to first reply, in minutes.
• Share of leads replied to within five minutes.
• Leads that never got a reply. The target is zero.
• Cost per booked inspection, not cost per lead.

That last one is the fix. A $228 lead that books an inspection is a good lead. A $228 lead that waited 42 hours and hired your competitor is the most expensive thing you bought this month.

Fix the boring thing first. To see what it's worth in your business, run your numbers through the ROI calculator.