There are seven ways to get a solar customer in Australia. Most installers use two and complain about both. Here is what each one costs, how fast it works, and who it suits.
What follows includes the channels that do not involve us and the ones we would not recommend. Prices are ranges, because that is how they behave. Anyone quoting you a single number for the cost of a solar lead is selling you something.
You pay a lead vendor, they send you a homeowner's details, you call. Shared leads go to three to five installers at once. Exclusive leads go only to you.
Shared residential leads sit around $20 to $50 each, and up to $50 to $100 at the better end of the market. Exclusive, SMS-verified residential leads run $50 to $100, with $50 to $70 described as the common price. Commercial leads run $150 to $250 depending on system size and how far the vendor qualified them.
The problem with shared leads is not the price, it is the race. Five installers get the same phone number within seconds of each other. The first to call has an enormous advantage, which means the channel rewards whoever can drop everything at 2pm on a Tuesday. If you are on a roof at 2pm on a Tuesday, you are buying leads that someone else converts.
Every published figure for Australian lead pricing we could find comes from a company that sells leads. We have used their ranges because there is no independent dataset, and you should read them the way you would read a supplier's own price guide. Your actual cost depends on your state, your close rate and how hard you negotiate.
Full control, works the day you switch it on, and expensive. Solar is among the dearer categories in Australian search. Reported solar cost per click sits around $8 to $22. For Australian service-plus-city searches generally, median cost per click ran from about $13.70 in Adelaide up to about $23.21 in Sydney, and Australian click prices rose roughly 31 per cent between January and May 2026.
Turn that into a cost per lead. At a 3 per cent landing page conversion rate, a $15 click means roughly $500 to get one enquiry. At 6 per cent it halves. That number frightens people, and it should not on its own: the enquiry is exclusive, it is yours the moment it lands, and nobody else is calling that homeowner. Compare cost per job won, not cost per lead.
The $250 to $700 implied cost per lead is our own arithmetic on published click costs, not a published figure. Treat it as a shape rather than a price.
The slowest to build, the cheapest per lead once it works, and the most neglected thing in this trade. A homeowner searching "solar installers near me" sees three map results before they see anything else. Being one of those three is worth more than any paid channel, it costs nothing but attention, and almost nobody does it properly.
The Google Business Profile playbook is entirely about this.
Six to twelve months before it pays anything, then it compounds. Worth it if you plan to still be trading in three years and you have someone who can write. Not worth it if you need work in March. Most installer websites have four pages and a contact form, which is not a content strategy, it is a business card.
The highest close rate of anything on this list, and the one systematically left on the table. You have a database of people who let you on their roof and were happy about it. Most installers never contact them again.
Two things to do with that list. First, batteries: anyone who bought panels before 2023 does not have storage, is now watching their feed-in tariff fall, and is a warm battery customer who already trusts you. Second, referral asks, made once, at the right moment, rather than never.
Where we sit, so read this with that in mind. A listing or a banner on a publication reaches homeowners who are researching rather than searching for a quote form. The traffic is warm and it is early, which means it is a different thing from a lead.
A publisher does not drive volume the way an aggregator does. If you need twenty jobs next month, buy leads or run ads, and do not buy a listing from us or anyone like us. What a publication gives you is presence in front of people at the research stage, and a third-party context that a paid ad does not carry. It is a slow, cheap channel that works alongside the fast expensive ones. Anyone in our category telling you otherwise is overselling.
Still works, particularly in outer suburbs and regional centres where the local installer has a name and the national brands do not bother. It is unfashionable and the industry sneers at it, largely because of a decade of bad operators, but a well-run stand at a regional shopping centre still produces conversations at a cost per booked appointment that ads cannot match.
The reputational risk is real and it is manageable. The rule is that nobody signs anything at the stand. You book an assessment, you leave, you turn up when you said you would. The moment your people are trained to close on the spot, you have become the thing that gave the channel its reputation.
Channel choice follows crew size and geography more than it follows preference. Pick the row that describes you.
| If you are | Do this first | Do not bother yet |
|---|---|---|
| Two people, one city | Google Business Profile and review velocity. Then past-customer battery reactivation. Both cost time, not money. | Google Ads. You cannot answer the phone fast enough to justify $500 a lead, and an unmanaged account will lose you $2,000 proving it. |
| Three to eight, one metro area | Business Profile, plus a small tightly geo-fenced Ads account with someone competent running it. Add exclusive leads to fill gaps in the calendar. | SEO as a primary channel, and shared leads unless you have a person whose actual job is to call them within minutes. |
| Ten or more, statewide | Ads and exclusive leads for volume, a real content and SEO programme for margin, and a referral system that runs without being remembered. | Door knocking, unless you already have a trained team and a region where it works. It does not scale by hiring. |
| Regional or remote | Business Profile and word of mouth, which in a town of 20,000 are the same thing. Local sponsorship earns more than a banner ad. | Aggregator leads. The vendors have thin coverage outside metro and you will pay metro prices for a lead two hours' drive away. |
Cost per lead is the number everyone quotes and it is the wrong one. Cost per job won is the number that pays wages.
A $60 exclusive lead that closes at 30 per cent costs you about 3.3 leads a sale, or roughly $200 to win a job. A $60 shared lead that closes at 10 per cent costs you ten leads a sale, or roughly $600. Same price on the invoice, three times the cost of the job.
Which means the first thing to fix is never the lead source. It is the close rate, and the close rate in this trade is mostly a function of how fast you call. That is the next guide.
Lead price ranges are from Australian lead-vendor published guides, 2026, including LeadsHQ, QuoteLeads and Why Solar. These are companies that sell leads. Solar cost per click and the Australian service-plus-city medians are from published 2026 Google Ads benchmark reporting. The implied cost per lead for Google Ads is our own calculation from those click costs at a 3 to 6 per cent conversion rate. Figures current as at August 2026.
Five guides. Written once, reviewed every six months.
Lead prices by channel with the sources named, the Google Business Profile playbook, a follow-up cadence that stops instead of nagging, the 2026 rebate picture, and what our own readers research before they buy. Useful whether or not you ever advertise with us.