You run a solar installation business or an equipment supply company in London. Your clients are homeowners in Bromley, Ealing or Enfield adding panels and battery storage, landlords looking at their properties' energy performance, small businesses with a warehouse roof doing nothing, schools and community buildings. You know a growing share of those buyers now look for an installer online. Before investing to make sure they find you, one question matters most, and it is a fair one: how many new clients would it take for this to pay?
This guide does not give you market statistics, because they say nothing about your business. It gives you a way of reasoning you can apply to your own figures, the same logic as the calculator on the Traffic Engine page.
Start with the right unit: what a client is worth
The most common mistake is to think in terms of the invoice for one installation. What matters for payback is what you actually earn from a client once equipment, labour, scaffolding and overheads are paid, and over the whole relationship.
In solar, that value often goes beyond the first job. A satisfied homeowner comes back to add a battery or an EV charger, signs a maintenance plan, or upgrades an inverter a few years later. A business client fits out a second site. A household on a street of similar houses recommends you to the neighbours. To estimate a client's value, add up the margin on the first installation and what can reasonably follow over the next few years.
You know your margins better than anyone. Pick a realistic figure, neither your best job nor your worst, and use that as the value of a client throughout the reasoning below.
Set it against the cost of visibility
The second element is the cost. With Traffic Engine, it is made up of a one-time setup of £1,300 (the £590 Visibility Audit is deducted from it if you start within 30 days) and a monthly plan on a 12-month commitment.
| Plan | Per month | Year one, setup included |
|---|---|---|
| Presence | £940 | £12,580 |
| Momentum | £1,600 | £20,500 |
| Flood | £3,000 | £37,300 |
These are Traffic Engine's own prices, not an industry benchmark.
The arithmetic
The reasoning is simple. Divide the year-one investment for the plan you are considering by the value of a client. The result is the number of new clients, won thanks to your visibility, that you need over the first year to break even. Every client beyond that is profit. Then repeat the exercise for the other plans: a lighter plan needs fewer clients to break even, a more intensive one aims to bring more of them.
Picture a typical situation. An installer in south London whose average client is worth a meaningful margin, as is usual for a full panel and battery system, compares Momentum at £20,500 for the year with that figure. In most cases the answer is a handful of clients across twelve months, not dozens. For a commercial installer whose clients are businesses or schools, it is often fewer still.
These are ways of reasoning, not promises. Nobody can guarantee you a number of clients. But they show the order of magnitude: the question is not whether you need a flood of new work, but whether a few extra clients over a year are realistic for your business.
Allow for the ramp-up
Visibility does not have the same effect in month one as in month twelve. The first three months establish your presence; enquiries then arrive more steadily. The calculator builds that ramp-up in, so it shows you the month in which the investment is paid back rather than an overly optimistic figure.
That is also why you should judge payback over the year, not month by month. Judging the return after six weeks is like judging a solar array on a grey November afternoon. The measured review at three months is there to confirm the trajectory is right.
The questions to ask yourself
- What is my real margin per client, including batteries, add-ons and maintenance?
- How many extra installations can my teams handle each month without cutting corners on quality or certification paperwork?
- What share of my quotes turn into jobs? If you win one quote in three, you need three enquiries per client.
- What does each client won through leaflets, canvassing or lead-generation sites cost me today?
If you want to measure what you are already losing without visibility, our guide on the cost of being invisible for a solar installer runs the reasoning the other way. The general approach is set out in our guide on working out the payback of a visibility investment.
What Traffic Engine brings you
Traffic Engine is Kolonell's service for making your company appear when a homeowner or business looks for a solar installer in London, on Google and in AI assistant answers, so that you receive qualified quote requests. Kolonell applied the approach to its own website first, and the Search Console curves are published on the offer page and updated every day. You receive a dated report every week, and if what your plan includes is not live on time, the following month is free. Solar in London has only 3 standard seats per area. See the offer and check whether a seat is open.
Now run the numbers with your own figures in the payback calculator. Before you sign with any provider, read our questions a solar installer should ask before signing.