How small funnel changes are cutting solar lead costs in half

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December 19, 2025

5:56

How small funnel changes are cutting solar lead costs in half

This video breaks down how small changes inside a lead funnel can dramatically improve conversion rates for solar and battery campaigns.

I walk through a live example from one of the largest solar installers in Ireland, explain why simple image and headline tests are outperforming expectations, and show how marginal gains stack up into massive performance improvements over time.

If you are running ads but not actively testing your funnel, this is likely the biggest lever you are missing.

For context, this video was originally recorded on 7 December 2024, views and strategies may have changed since.

Featuring

Jude Cornish

Chief Commercial Officer

Video transcript

I hereby request to interrupt your Saturday evening with a very important video about conversion rate optimization of prospective funnels.

So, let’s jump straight into it.

This is a funnel that we’re running right now for the biggest solar installer in all of Ireland. When they first took us on, they wanted us to 3x the performance of their existing campaigns. Within 3 weeks, we had 5x’d the performance of their campaigns — i.e., we dropped their cost per lead by 80%. And that ad was actually translating to very, very strong cost per sale figures as well.

Now, one of the ways that we’ve been able to do this is that we’re constantly testing stuff.

Sam in our team is responsible for media buying as well as optimizing our 40-ish lead conversion funnels, basically.

So, one test that we’re running right now for Activate is literally just changing the image that is shown on the first page of the funnel.

You’ve got this lovely image with a few vans outside with this nice Irish home there, versus this image that we’ve specifically taken on the shoot, framed it in a really nice way to make it look really nice — positioned it and headed it in a certain way so that it’s center frame, got the panels, got the nice clean van, all that kind of stuff, right?

And take a wild guess for how this has improved the performance of the campaign.

Has it decreased cost per lead by 20%? That’s pretty good. 25? Maybe 30%?

No — 56% better performance just from that one change. 56% better performance.

Now, why is this particularly relevant for you?

It’s relevant for you because we are on our… it says V9 there, but we’re probably on our 20th funnel variant.

And when one of these changes has a significant impact, we start to roll it out across the board for all of our clients.

Now, we’ve got a team that is literally… I mean Sam is dedicated to doing this on a regular basis. It’s not like we have one person trying to do absolutely everything within the business, right?

When you work with Solar On Steroids, you actually get a team that works alongside — or latches on to — your team. It’s an extension of your team. And each person within that team is a specialist in what they do.

And that’s why we’re able to get increases in conversion rate like this.

Other examples:

Eco Renewables — again, just testing a difference in image here. We’ve got this nice house there that they’ve installed for, and then we’ve got Chris just literally pointing at some panels, a gateway, and a Powerwall 3. And the conversion rate on that is wild: 13.24%.

Again, that’s almost a 100% increase on that one.

Solar Works — very similar situation. This time, the variant has underperformed against the standard.

So this one: lovely shot again that was taken intentionally on the shoot day of Jesse in front of the van. Looks really nice. The colors are absolutely popping there versus a drone shot of Jesse in front of a really nice install, which is one of the main installs featured on the ads — so that consistency between the ad and where they land.

But unfortunately, that test looks like so far it’s underperforming versus the sample. It’s too early to tell — there’s not enough conversions.

But it’s not just images we test.

Even minor tweaks to the wording of the headline, for example, can have a massive impact. You’ve got here 3% versus 4% there.

And that doesn’t sound like much, but that’s a… actually, that’s a 33% increase.

So we’ve literally just changed it from:

“Arrange your free solar and battery quote in 30 seconds”

to:

“Arrange your solar and battery quote in 30 seconds for free”

It’s literally just the order of the words. No change to the image, no nothing.

And we’ve been able to command an extra kind of 30% in performance, which is obviously going to lead to a really nice influx in terms of lead flow.

I mean, Infinite Energy only spending 2K a month and they’ve had 18 leads in the last week — so 500 by 18… 27 per lead — and it’s because we’ve been doing this since we started working with them in August of 2024.

You know — a year and four months ago-ish.

It’s pretty insane the kind of 1% increments and how they stack up over time. I’m sure you’ve seen that chart where if you get 1% better every single day, you end up the year like 40 times better or something like that, right?

It’s always about just making these little tiny adjustments that gradually stack up and stack up over time.

And we accumulate and assimilate all of this data from all of these funnels to make decisions across all 40.

But we’re also running individual tests on each individual funnel.

You know, the images — you can’t use the same image for multiple clients, right? So these are pretty bespoke tests.

But we might learn overall that actually if we have an individual on the image pointing at a very clear package of products, that’s a really good angle to go for — and that’s going to work for other installers across the board.

So then we’ll start rolling that out and testing it against what they’re running currently.

It’s a huge lever for us that we use quite heavily alongside the ads to actually increase the performance for our clients.

I mean, yeah — just like Eco Renewables again, they’ve done 200K from us in about 3 weeks.

Wild.

And they’ve been able to do that because they’re getting that many leads — 10 leads just today. It’s Saturday. By Monday they’ll probably have 20 that they can dial straight through to.

And they’re only spending about 4K a month. So if that’s over 30 days, 133 a day, and they’re getting 20 leads, that’s 10 leads a day — that’s £13 a lead.

What would you be able to do with £13 leads? Especially if you’re booking 50–60% of them in for a quote or survey — £26 per quote.

I mean, you can scale a business off that… that’s for

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