How the math works
You pay for every lead. Some of the people pick up the phone. Some of those book. So one booked job costs the lead price divided by the share that pick up, times the share that book.
The two rates move the number more than the price does. Every lead that never picks up was paid for at the same price as the one that booked. Every lead you reach and lose was too.
At $60 a lead, with 40% picking up and 25% of those booking, that's $60 divided by 10%, or $600 a job. Over a month you pay $1,800 for about 3 jobs. Over a year it's $21,600.
What the FTC found
In January 2023 the Federal Trade Commission ordered one of the largest home improvement lead marketplaces to pay up to $7.2 million over the way it sold leads to service providers. The FTC's complaint said the company had told providers its leads turned into jobs at rates it couldn't back up, and that many leads didn't match the services or the area the provider had signed up for. The final order bars the company from making false or misleading claims about its leads.
The FTC's announcement is on ftc.gov.
What to count on your own statement
Three numbers, for one month. How many leads you were charged for. How many of those you reached on the phone. How many booked. The first one is on the statement. The other two you have to count.
Then run them here. The number that comes out is what one job costs you, and it's the one to hold next to what a job pays.
Where leads you own come from
A lead that comes from your own website is yours. Nobody else paid for it and nobody else is calling the same homeowner. Those leads come from four places.
- A website that shows up on Google in every town you work in, not just your home town.
- A Google Business Profile that says the same things the website says: the same services, the same towns, the same phone number.
- Reviews, asked for at the end of every job, while you're still standing there.
- A phone that gets answered, or a text that goes out the moment it doesn't.
A concrete coating company we built for, out of River Falls, Wisconsin, showed up on Google 5.9x more often and got 2.7x more visits from Google over the same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site, and now shows up in 27 towns. Every one of those visits came from a homeowner who searched for the work and found them, and none of them was sold to anyone else.