Whether you’re buying or selling solar leads or managing lead flows, one of the crucial aspects of your business is the price. As a seller, you’d like to get the highest price for your leads; as a buyer, you’re looking for high-quality leads at the lowest possible price to lower your cost per lead (CLP) rates and increase your ROI.
In practice, this also means having clear control over how leads are qualified, routed, and prioritized across different destinations, ensuring each inquiry follows the most efficient path based on quality, timing, and performance.
Ultimately, the market decides the actual price per lead. But it’s also you who impacts the market by setting your bids or asks based on the solar leads you have to distribute or acquire, including their demographics and other details you can collect with lead tracking and analytics software.
Speaking of lead tracking and analytics software, having access to an enterprise-grade tracking and distribution platform, like Phonexa, unlocks valuable insights into the solar leads you generate and manage. And then you can optimize your CPL rates, bid or ask prices, and many other marketing aspects.
“We’re seeing good growth in home services and home improvement industries and domestic solar – those were very antiquated industries, but now they are catching up and putting themselves in the mix really.” – David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Affiliate Marketing Podcast
Phonexa provides an unparalleled enterprise-grade lead and call tracking, analytics, and distribution ecosystem, helping optimize your lead flows without having to jump between multiple platforms and tools.
Get started with Phonexa to turn your solar leads and calls into revenue.
Knowing who your leads are – their demographics, psychographics, or firmographics for B2B leads – is crucial for identifying the best path for the leads you generate, distribute, or manage, and for deciding whether to accept or submit a particular lead in the first place. Even in established lead flows, real-time lead tracking and analytics keep CPL rates or pay-per-lead prices optimal at all times.
It’s no secret that affiliate marketing has long faced challenges related to traffic quality and fraud exposure, so having a system that can sieve out fraudulent, irrelevant, and low-quality leads and phone calls is a must for most businesses.
Take this quiz to check your marketing fraud prevention proficiency.
With Phonexa, you get everything you need to evaluate incoming solar leads in real time and ensure they align with your target demographics, psychographics, or firmographics before they move further through your lead flow. Moreover, you can do it in real time BEFORE accepting leads or submitting them to partners, with Phonexa acting as a gatekeeper to prevent bad traffic from entering your marketing funnel.
Rather than relying on static pricing assumptions, brands and marketing teams can use real-time data and performance signals to prioritize how solar leads are handled and routed, while maintaining consistent quality standards across campaigns and channels. While Phonexa can’t help you determine how much to charge for leads or a fair price under the pay-per-lead pricing model, the platform enables you to block bad traffic that could otherwise tarnish your reputation. This is true for everyone: lead generators, brands, affiliates, and affiliate networks.
“I think more companies will tap into the affiliate industry and also explore the ways to stop relying on third-party data suppliers and sources by bringing it all under one roof, so they can analyze the right things and then make the right decisions.
A big change is that more of the industry is becoming real-time, so we’re making sure we bring everything into a real-time space where you can roll with the punches and adapt and optimize things on the fly.” – David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Affiliate Marketing Podcast
I’m not going to lie: Phonexa is a complicated system with hundreds of data points to wrap your head around. So you may need time to conquer the learning curve and reap all the benefits that in-depth lead and phone call tracking provides.
However, you can also make things easier for yourself and your team members by bringing the most important marketing metrics to the dashboard. More often than not, there’s no need to analyze every single metric – a bird’s-eye view of your performance may be enough.
Here’s what the Phonexa lead tracking dashboard looks like:
As you can see, the dashboard displays your total daily revenue, net earnings, number of leads sold, EPL, and some other metrics. But again, you can reconfigure yourself however you see fit, depending on your campaign goals, level of access you provide to your employees, and the tracking and analytics data you have access to (affiliate networks usually have more data).
Here’s how lead and phone call tracking and analytics improve performance marketing:
With consumers constantly switching touchpoints, a comprehensive lead and phone call tracking platform like Phonexa can help cover the most complex customer journey, such as when a consumer discovers you on social media using their mobile phone, disengages for several days, and then makes a purchase from their PC. By connecting these interactions through shared tracking and attribution signals, businesses and performance marketers gain a clearer view of how different channels contribute to conversions, even across fragmented and non-linear journeys.
Take a product tour to explore Phonexa’s tracking and distribution ecosystem in action.
Whether you are an affiliate selling leads, an advertiser buying leads, or an affiliate network managing the process, tracking and analyzing your leads in real time can help optimize your marketing, whether it’s pay-per-lead, click, sale, or another performance marketing model.
By tracking your campaigns with Phonexa, you can understand how your cost per lead – the total spend to generate or acquire a high-quality lead – aligns with the quality of your leads and specific demographic, psychographic, and firmographic details.
For example, you can compare how solar leads from location A perform against those from location B, then optimize your marketing efforts by doubling down on the most effective traffic channels and partners and eliminating unprofitable or underperforming ones.
Here’s a screenshot of Phonexa’s deeper-level lead insights:
Among other things, you can track the freshness of leads in your system, such as how many times the same lead was offered within a specific time frame, like a day, a week, two weeks, or a month. For leads that were offered multiple times and not bought, you can find a better pricing point. For instance, if the post price was $1 (as on the screen above), you can reduce it to sell your leads.
Likewise, you can see the percentage of leads accepted by every advertiser and how many of those leads resulted in a sale, as well as you can get a comprehensive overview of every lead at a glance. All in all, as you go deeper into statistics beyond the dashboard homescreen, you unlock ever more granular insights into leads and phone calls and can work those insights into actionable marketing steps to optimize spend, exposure with specific campaigns, and ROI.
No less importantly, most lead tracking and analytics features are also available for phone calls, including call duration, IVR insights, call outcomes, keywords used in the conversation, and more. Phone call insights are collected and stored in the Call Logic Module.
With Phonexa supporting customizable lead distribution flows – both a cascading ping tree and competitive ping post lead distribution systems – you can use all collected information for data-driven lead distribution. For companies, lead generators, and performance marketers handling high lead volumes, this approach helps balance lead quality, routing priorities, and operational capacity across campaigns and channels.
A ping tree lead distribution is a safer and more predictable routing model in which you configure campaigns based on the requirements of your intended destinations, including the types of leads they can accept, volume limits, and priority values, and then distribute incoming leads deterministically, one campaign after the next, starting with the highest-priority destination that meets the configured criteria and moving down the cascade until an eligible endpoint is found.
Here’s what a ping tree builder looks like within Phonexa:
A ping tree lead distribution makes routing predictable by applying predefined qualification criteria and routing priorities consistently across inbound traffic. This structured approach helps teams maintain stable lead flows and operate within their established compliance and quality standards.
Once qualification rules and routing priorities are configured, leads are routed sequentially without requiring constant manual intervention. If lead volume or performance changes over time, teams can adjust qualification criteria or routing thresholds to better align capacity with incoming demand.
Here’s a ping tree solar lead distribution example:
This example illustrates how Phonexa’s ping tree evaluates lead attributes against predefined routing priorities and sequentially routes each lead to the most suitable available destination.
A ping post lead distribution includes two phases: when buyers first get partial lead data – for example, ZIP code and credit score – and then make their bids for the lead based on how they interpret this data. Then the highest bidders get the rest of the info (post).
Here’s a ping post solar lead distribution example:
With a ping post lead distribution, you can maximize revenue per lead while still giving buyers full control over the bidding process. For phone calls, you can even provide the lead’s phone numbers so buyers get a full understanding of the offered consumer.
Speaking of phone calls, Phonexa’s Ping Post Calls 2.0 is the system responsible for phone call distribution, supporting 5 call routing flows:
At the end of the day, though, whether leads or phone calls, Phonexa gives you maximum flexibility in setting up your consumer distribution system so you can get an edge in a solar market of any complexity, as well as any other industry, for that matter.
When managing solar lead acquisition and distribution at scale, you cannot rely on guesswork, and real-time call tracking and analytics can help you turn every deal into math, so you can set the optimal price based on the lead’s ZIP code, credit score, homeownership status, timing, product interest, whether the lead is new or has already been offered within your system, and other factors.
Over time, you can identify relations between input data and outcomes; for example, how credit ratings affect solar installation rates. While it’s obvious that consumers with higher credit scores are generally more valuable, you’ll be able to quantify how much more expensive a solar lead with a credit rating of 800 should be or could be than a solar lead with a credit rating of 650, and so on.
With Phonexa, you can ensure your lead pricing is dynamic and reasonable:
“If you’re using a true end-to-end tracking solution, you’ll likely have an idea of what conversions need to look like along the way in order to achieve what you need. But if and when they don’t, be ready to make changes and adapt things to ensure that you’re not just planning on hoping that things will change when you’ve done nothing to help that change happen.” – David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Affiliate Marketing Podcast
Having accurate visibility into lead cost estimates for various lead categories is crucial for optimizing your marketing, and Phonexa’s call tracking and analytics ecosystem is designed to provide the data and insights needed to analyze CPL, attribution, and conversion efficiency.
For example, if you’re spending $50,000 monthly on pay-per-lead campaigns – say, an average cost per lead is $40 – generating 1,250 leads while not differentiating them by homeownership status, credit scores, and strong/weak ZIP codes, you’re likely underperforming hugely. Without proper segmentation and visibility, this often leads to lower installation rates, frustrated sales teams over lead quality, and poor retention. Lead tracking and analytics help surface these gaps, making it easier to adjust targeting, qualification, and distribution strategies.
By using Phonexa, you can identify performance by lead attributes. For example, you may find that California homeowners with credit scores of 700 or higher convert three times better, despite costing only about 50% more than lower-quality segments. This allows you to prioritize higher-performing lead profiles instead of scaling volume that doesn’t convert.
With lead, call, and analytics tracking at hand, you can gain greater control over acquisition efficiency, attribution, and optimization, maximizing performance across the entire lead and call lifecycle.
One of the best things about Phonexa is that as you accumulate lead and phone call insights, it gets easier to make the right business decisions, such as where, when, and to whom display your ads, what campaigns to focus on, and how to set leads and calls on the most probable conversion path.
Phonexa’s predictive modeling allows you to test marketing scenarios by pairing historical data with various input parameters. This way, you can run dozens and hundreds of simulations at no cost until the perfect settings are found. Then you can pick the winners and A/B-test them to confirm and optimize your campaigns, reducing risk even further.
With Phonexa, you’re closing one of the deadliest performance marketing gaps – the necessity to coordinate multiple platforms and tools to cover your business needs. Having LMS Sync for leads and Call Logic for phone calls at the core and six additional features on top, you’re bringing it all in one place, one interactive dashboard that visualizes your performance in an intuitive way so you don’t lose the forest for the trees.
Likewise, you get lightning-fast lead reports, a decisive advantage in competitive markets where decision-making speed matters. With Phonexa, you can act faster on inbound opportunities in competitive markets, guide them toward conversion, and continuously grow your ROI while maintaining quality standards across campaigns and channels. And you get robust protection from marketing fraud and low-quality traffic.
Here are the two core products you get at a single price:
| LMS Sync | Lead tracking & distribution software |
| Call Logic | Call tracking & distribution software |
Here are the six extra features you get for free as a client with Phonexa:
Get started now to enhance your lead management and grow your revenue streams.
Solar leads are generally considered one of the most expensive leads, but the actual profits you can make on your solar lead generation or acquisition campaigns mostly depend on the type of solar leads. For example, solar financing leads are usually expensive because of their high lifetime value (TLV), potentially costing dozens of thousands of dollars or more.
As for the other factors– whether it’s pay per lead or pay per sale, the commission size, geographical limitations, etc. – you can always make a switch to a more profitable or more suitable affiliate program anytime, which is much easier than changing your target audience.
Whether you’re a solar installer, affiliate network, or publisher, tracking the leads you acquire or generate in real-time and historically makes it possible to pave an optimal conversion path for every lead in your marketing funnel, including buying or selling them at the right price.
For example, if you’re a local solar installer, you might want to use lead tracking to verify whether the leads in question are from your coverage area. So lead tracking, especially multi-level tracking, like comparing the information the lead has entered on the form with, for example, their phone-number-driven location, can ensure you only buy solar leads that your on-site installation team can reach.
Numbers-wise, there’s no definitive answer on what a good lead cost is, with the only objective indicator being the ROI on your lead sales or acquisition campaigns. Speaking of your ROI, you can calculate it by multiplying the conversion rate by the average order value, then subtracting your total spend. And then you can determine your reasonable cost per lead.
As a lead seller, your price should obviously be above your total marketing spend, but it should also be competitive so you can sell all the leads you generate while they retain high conversion potential. Your actual price per solar lead is almost always determined by the terms of the affiliate program, which in turn depend on the level of competition and the overall state of the market.
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