You paid for the lead. You rang within ten minutes. You quoted properly. And you never heard back, because four other tradesmen got sent the same job and one of them undercut you by eighty quid.
If that sounds familiar, you have used a pay-per-lead site. Here is how Bark, MyBuilder and Rated People actually work, the sum almost nobody does, and when they are genuinely worth the money.
There are two different businesses here
People lump these sites together, but they charge in two completely different ways and the difference matters more than the brand name.
Membership. You pay a fixed amount every month or year to be listed. Checkatrade is the best known. The fee is the same whether you get fifty jobs or none, which we put real numbers against in is Checkatrade worth it.
Pay per lead. You buy credits, and you spend them each time you want to contact a customer. Bark, MyBuilder and Rated People all work broadly this way. No monthly commitment, but every conversation costs you.
Membership is a fixed cost you have to earn back. Pay per lead is a variable cost that quietly scales with how busy you are. Neither is automatically worse. They fail in different ways.
What you are actually buying
This is the bit that catches people out, so it is worth being blunt about it.
On a pay-per-lead site you are not buying a job. You are not even buying a conversation. You are buying permission to try to start one.
You spend the credit, you send your message or make the call, and then one of three things happens. They reply and you get a shot. They reply to somebody else. Or they never reply to anybody, because they were getting a rough idea of cost and were never going to book anyone this month.
You pay the same in all three cases.
The shared lead problem
Most of these sites sell the same enquiry to several tradespeople. That is the business model, not a fault in it, and it is usually stated plainly if you look.
But it has two consequences worth understanding.
The first is obvious: you are in a race, and the person who replies within minutes usually wins. If you are up a ladder when the notification comes in, you have already lost to somebody who was sat in a van.
The second is less obvious and more damaging. When several quotes land at once and the customer has nothing to tell you apart, the only thing left to compare is price. These platforms quietly train customers to shop on cost, and they train you to bid against people whose overheads you know nothing about.
The sum nobody does
Here is the calculation worth doing before you buy another credit pack. You do not need the platform’s figures, only your own.
Take what you spent on credits last month. Divide by the number of jobs you actually won from them. That is your real cost per job, and it is almost never the number people have in their head.
A worked example. Say a lead costs you around five pounds in credits and you contact twenty customers. That is a hundred pounds. If four of them reply and you win one, that one job cost you a hundred pounds to get. If the job was worth two hundred, you have had a bad month. If it was worth two thousand, you have had a very good one.
That is the whole thing. Not “are lead sites a rip-off”, but what is my cost per won job, and is it small next to what the job pays?
Prices and credit costs change, so use your own invoices rather than anybody’s advertised rate, including the numbers above.
When they are genuinely worth it
We build websites, so you would expect us to tell you to cancel everything. We are not going to, because there are times these sites earn their keep.
You are starting out. No reviews, no reputation, no one to recommend you. A lead site will put work in front of you this week, which nothing else will. Use it, and use the jobs to build reviews you own.
You have gone quiet unexpectedly. A cancelled contract, a slow February. Paying for a few leads to plug a gap is a perfectly sensible business decision.
You are moving into a new area or trade. Nobody knows you there yet. Buying your way in while you build local presence is reasonable.
Your jobs are big. If an average job is worth four figures, a hundred pounds of credits to land one is cheap. The maths works far better for a loft conversion than for a tap washer.
When they stop being worth it
The trouble is that the above are all temporary situations, and the spend usually is not.
Two or three years in, plenty of tradespeople are still buying leads for work they would now get anyway, from an area where they are well known, at a price squeezed by people they are tired of bidding against. The platform has become a habit rather than a decision.
The test is simple. If you stopped tomorrow, would the phone stop? If the honest answer is no, you are paying for something you already have.
What you are renting, and what you own
Here is the part that only becomes obvious years later.
Everything you build on a lead site stays there. Your reviews, your profile, your ranking within their system, your history. You cannot export it. If they change the pricing, change the algorithm, or let six more tradesmen into your postcode, there is nothing you can do and nowhere to take it.
That is the deal, and it is the same deal as renting a shop. There is nothing wrong with renting a shop. It just is not the same as owning one.
The things you own work differently. A Google Business Profile costs nothing and the reviews on it are yours. A website is yours. Both get better the longer you have them, and neither sends the same enquiry to four of your competitors.
Use them for the thing they are good at
The smartest way we see people use these sites is as a tap rather than a mains supply.
Turn them on when you are quiet, off when you are busy. Treat every job won through them as a chance to collect something you keep: ask for a Google review rather than only a platform one, and send the customer to your own site afterwards. Getting more Google reviews is the single highest-value thing you can do with a lead-site job, because it is the one part that follows you.
Over a couple of years that flips the ratio. You start the year paying for most of your work and end it paying for the gaps.
What this costs against a website
Worth putting side by side, because they are usually treated as separate budgets when they are really the same one.
A moderate lead-site habit of a hundred pounds a month is twelve hundred a year, every year, for leads shared with your competitors, on a profile you cannot take with you.
A website is a one-off cost, it is yours, nobody else appears on it, and it is still working in year three. We set out what the different price points actually buy in cheap website design: what you get for £0, £199 and £2,000, and our own prices are on the site in public.
This is not an either-or. Plenty of good businesses run both. But if you have never compared the two numbers, do it this week — most people are surprised which one is bigger.
If you are on one now
Three things, none of which require you to cancel anything.
Work out your real cost per won job from last month. Not per lead. Per job you actually got paid for.
Ask every one of those customers for a Google review, so the work builds something you keep.
If you are along the Slough to Uxbridge corridor, there is more on local demand in the trades most in demand between Slough and West London.
Buying leads because the diary has gone quiet? Read how to get work in winter first — January is the worst month to start.
Then check whether you could be found without the platform at all. If you cannot find yourself on Google for what you do and where you do it, that is the gap the lead sites are filling, and it is a cheaper gap to close than most people think.