Pay per lead marketing agency, or pay only when the job is paid?

The pitch is simple and it sounds fair. You do not pay a retainer. You pay a fixed price each time the agency hands you a homeowner who asked for a quote. No leads, no bill. For an owner who has been burned by a $3,000 a month agency that delivered a monthly report and not much else, that sounds like the honest version of marketing.

The detail that decides whether it works is the definition of a lead. In most pay per lead contracts a lead is a form fill or a phone call that lasted past a set number of seconds. It is not a booked job, and it is not a paid invoice. A wrong number that stays on the line for 61 seconds can count. A renter who cannot approve the work can count. A homeowner who was price shopping five companies at once can count. You pay for each of them at the same rate you pay for the customer who signs.

There are two kinds of pay per lead seller. The first is the shared marketplace (Angi Leads, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Networx), which sells one homeowner inquiry to several contractors at once. The second is the exclusive pay per lead agency, which runs ads or ranks sites on your behalf and sends each inquiry to you alone at a higher price per lead. Exclusive is better, but in both cases the agency's job ends at the moment the phone rings.

The price per lead is the wrong number to compare. The number that matters is cost per booked job, and you get it by dividing the lead price by your close rate. Hook Agency's 2026 lead-services analysis puts close rates at 13 to 20 percent on shared leads and 27 to 30 percent on exclusive leads.

Take a shared lead at $60. At a 15 percent close rate you buy about seven leads to book one job, so the job cost you roughly $400 in lead fees before a truck rolls. Take an exclusive lead at $150. At a 28 percent close rate you buy about three and a half leads per job, so the job cost you roughly $535. Neither figure includes the hours your office spent calling back the leads that went nowhere.

Now put a $600 repair against those numbers. Under shared pay per lead, lead fees ate about two thirds of the ticket. Under a 17 percent share of the paid job, the same $600 repair costs $102, and the jobs that never booked cost nothing. The share model gets more expensive than pay per lead only on large tickets with a high close rate, which is covered honestly in the limits section below.

A pay per lead agency is paid when the phone rings. It has no stake in whether anyone answers, whether the caller was quoted correctly, whether the estimate was followed up, or whether the invoice was collected. Every one of those steps leaks revenue, and the agency's income is the same either way.

The leak is measurable. Invoca's analysis of 60 million calls found that 27 percent of inbound home services calls go unanswered. Under pay per lead you already paid for those calls. A model that earns only on paid jobs has to fix the leak to get paid at all, which is why PayOnJobs runs the 24/7 phone answering, the missed-call text back, the estimate follow-up, and the payment link, in addition to the ads and the website.

This is also why the fee is a share and not a flat price per booking. A flat fee per booking makes a $200 service call and a $14,000 system replacement worth the same to the agency, so the agency chases whichever is easier to generate. A percentage keeps the partner interested in the jobs you actually want.

There is no setup fee, no monthly fee, and no fee per lead. We build the website, manage the Google Business Profile, run the Google Ads account, answer the phone around the clock with an AI receptionist, follow up on open estimates, and send the payment link. We take 17 percent of revenue on jobs that came in through the tracked number and that the customer paid for.

You fund your own ad spend, paid directly to Google with no markup from us, at a minimum of $1,500 per month. That is the one cost that is not contingent, and we say so up front because most performance pitches hide it. The split happens automatically at the moment the customer pays (83 percent to you, 17 percent to us), so nobody is chasing an invoice and nobody can quietly change the count.

We sign one partner per trade inside a 25-mile radius. The initial term is 12 months, and after that either side can leave with 30 days notice. You own the domain, the website, the customer list, the Google Business Profile, and the reviews.

Ask how a lead is defined in the contract, in writing. Ask whether the lead is sold to anyone else, and how many others. Ask what the dispute process is for a bad lead, how long you have to file, and what share of disputes were credited last year. Ask who owns the website, the tracking number, and the ad account if you leave.

Then ask the question that sorts agencies fastest: would you be willing to be paid only on jobs that close? An agency that is confident in its lead quality has a real answer to that. An agency that is not will change the subject to lead volume.

A revenue share is not the cheapest option for everyone. If your average ticket is large (full roof replacements, full system installs) and your office already closes exclusive leads at 30 percent or better, a well run exclusive pay per lead program can cost less per job than 17 percent. Run your own numbers before you decide.

We also are not a fit if you cannot fund $1,500 a month in ad spend, if you need leads this week (the build takes about 14 days), if you want to keep answering every call yourself, or if another contractor in your trade already holds your 25-mile area. PayOnJobs is a new company and we do not yet publish partner results; judge us on the contract terms, which are all in writing.