How do I stop paying for shared leads?

You stop paying for shared leads gradually: build sources of calls that come only to you, and cut marketplace spend as those calls replace it. Canceling everything at once leaves a hole in the schedule, because the replacement takes time to build and I can’t tell you in advance how long. A lead source that pays for itself is worth keeping while the owned channels grow.

What you’re paying for now

A shared lead is a homeowner’s request that a marketplace typically sends to several companies. You’re racing the others to the phone, and often competing on price before anyone has met the customer. And the supply ends when you stop paying, with nothing left behind that belongs to you. That’s the difference to weigh in whether SEO is worth it compared with buying leads from Angi.

First, find the cost of a booked job from each source

The price of one lead is the wrong number to judge a source by, because not every lead becomes work. Before changing anything, run this sum for every source you pay.

1. Pick a period long enough to include a normal mix of busy and quiet weeks.
2. Add up everything paid to the source in that period, including leads that never answered and any subscription fee.
3. Count the jobs from that source that were booked and completed.
4. Divide the first figure by the second.
5. Compare the result with what that kind of job earns you.

Do it by service if you can. A marketplace may pay for itself on installations and lose money on small repairs, and the average hides that. The exercise can go either way: the leads may turn out to be worth more than you assumed, or less. In both cases the decision now rests on a number.

Then build the calls nobody else receives

The replacement is a set of things that send a customer to you alone. A homeowner who finds you in the map pack, the three businesses Google shows beside a map, has chosen to call you. The pieces are:

• A Google Business Profile that names every service you want calls for.
• A page on your site for each of those services.
• Reviews from real customers, asked for after every job.
• Search ads of your own, where the click goes to your page and your phone.

Ads still cost money, but the call isn’t shared. The profile, the pages and the reviews are SEO for a home-service company, and the map pack is the local SEO part of it.

Cut by city and by service

Reduce the spend where the replacement has arrived, and leave it alone where it hasn’t. Take a hypothetical company based in Santee. Its calls from the map may grow in Santee and El Cajon well before they grow in Chula Vista, because map rankings are strongest near the business. The sensible move is to stop buying leads in the first two cities and keep buying them in the third.

That only works if every call is tagged by source and city, so I set up tracking before any budget moves. I measure rankings on a grid across the service area, change one thing, and measure again about two weeks later. The call counts tell you when a city is ready.

Before you cancel a source

Ending a paid lead program takes some checking first.

• Read the terms you agreed to, including any notice period. They differ between platforms and they change.
• Find out what happens to your listing and reviews on that platform once you stop paying. A listing that stays up should still show your real phone number.
• Make sure the phone number customers have been calling is one you own.

The aim is to stop depending on a supply someone else prices. I can’t promise how many calls a given ranking will bring in your area, and if the numbers say a marketplace is still your best source in a city, I’ll tell you to keep it. Some companies end up buying no leads. Others keep one source that earns its place and drop the rest.