By Luis Johnson, founder of Lunere Digital. Published
Pay per lead vs pay per appointment comes down to one thing: who does the chasing. On pay per lead you are billed when a homeowner's details hit your phone, and from that second the calling, the texting and the rebooking are yours. On pay per appointment you're billed when a dated slot lands on your calendar, and somebody else did the calling to get it there. One model sells you raw material. The other sells you a finished thing you can walk into.
Neither is better in the abstract. The right one is whichever matches who in your shop is free to pick up the phone at 7:40 on a Tuesday evening.
The short version
- Pay per lead bills on contact details, so the follow-up labor sits on your side of the line.
- Pay per appointment bills on a dated slot, so the labor sits on the vendor's side and the price per unit is higher.
- Minyona publishes both models on its own site, at $50 to $200 per qualified lead or $200 to $400 per booked appointment.
- A lead you never call is a full loss. A booked slot you do not attend is a full loss plus a wasted hour.
- Ask what the refund covers before you ask what the unit costs, because that is where the two models really differ.
The labour you are buying back
Every form fill needs somebody to react to it. Text inside a minute, call inside five, call again that evening, call again the next morning, and then keep going for two weeks. That is the job. Pay per lead leaves it with you. Pay per appointment moves it to the vendor and charges you for it.
So the honest way to compare the two prices is to add your own labour back onto the lead price. Take the hourly cost of whoever does your follow-up, loaded, and work out how many minutes she spends per lead across a month. Add that to what you paid the vendor. Now the two numbers are comparable, and often much closer than the sticker prices suggest.
Harvard Business Review's March 2011 piece on online sales leads put the problem plainly, saying its research showed most companies aren't responding nearly fast enough. Fifteen years later, in a trade where the homeowner is frightened and shopping the same hour, that hasn't got any less true.
Each model leaks money somewhere different
Pay per lead leaks on the back end. You buy forty, you reach twenty-two, you book nine, six show. You paid for forty. If your follow-up slips for a week because your office manager was out, the leak gets worse and the vendor's numbers stay the same.
Pay per appointment leaks on definitions. The leak is in what the vendor is allowed to call an appointment. If a vendor counts a phone call the homeowner agreed to as a booking, you are back to buying leads at appointment prices. Make the vendor write down what has to be true before the meter runs: the homeowner owns the house, named a symptom, gave a timeframe, is the one who decides, and picked a time.
And ask what happens when he is not home. A no-show policy is the single line that tells you whether a pay-per-appointment vendor is confident in its own qualifying.
Which one should you buy?
| Pay per lead | Pay per appointment | |
|---|---|---|
| What triggers the invoice | Contact details arriving | A dated slot on your calendar |
| Who calls the homeowner first | You | The vendor |
| Who rebooks a cancellation | You | The vendor, usually, so confirm it |
| Price per unit | Lower | Higher, because the labour is in it |
| What a refund normally covers | Bad number, wrong trade, outside your area | A no-show or a booking that did not meet the written standard |
| Where you feel a slow week | Unworked leads in the inbox | Empty slots on the calendar |
| What you still have to staff | Speed to lead, all day, seven days | An estimator who turns up and quotes |
| How exposed you are to your own follow-up | Completely | Hardly, until the estimator is in the driveway |
Pick the model that matches who answers the phone
- You have a dedicated person answering inbound inside five minutes, every day including Saturday
- Buy per lead, because you already own the expensive part and you should not pay somebody else for it.
- Your office manager answers when she is not doing payroll, permits and warranty calls
- Buy per appointment, because the gap between a 3 minute callback and a 3 hour one is bigger than the price difference.
- Your estimator closes over 40 percent in the home but you cannot fill his week
- Buy per appointment. His time is the constraint, so buy the thing that puts an address in front of him.
- You are tracking neither your speed to lead nor your close rate
- Buy neither this month. Measure both for 30 days first, because you cannot judge either model without those two numbers.
When Pay per lead vendors is the better buy
- Your shop already has a setter who is good and not busy, so the vendor's call center is a cost you don't need.
- You want the raw contact so you can run your own nurture and keep every number in your own database.
- You sell more than one service off one call, and a scripted booker would miss the upsell your own person catches.
- You want the lowest possible unit price and you're willing to carry the conversion risk to get it.
- You want volume you can flex week to week without the vendor's booking capacity becoming your ceiling.
What should a pay-per-appointment vendor count as a booking?
A dated slot with a name, an address and a time, where the homeowner owns the house, named a symptom, said how soon he wants it handled, and is the one who decides on repairs. If any of that is missing, it is a lead with a calendar invite stapled to it.
Is pay per appointment always more expensive?
Per unit, yes. Per signed job, often not, because the conversion step that usually fails has already happened. Work it out on your own close rate from a booked inspection, which is normally far higher than your close rate from a cold form fill.
Can I run both at once?
You can, and for a month it is a decent test. Keep them in separate columns in your tracker so the cheaper unit price does not quietly borrow credit from the better conversion rate.
Which model handles a seasonal slowdown better?
Pay per appointment, usually, because you stop paying the moment the calendar stops filling. On pay per lead you can keep buying through a slow month and only find out later that nobody worked them.
If you would rather pay for the slot than the phone number, book a 30-minute call and I will take you through how a booking has to qualify before it counts.
Book My Strategy CallSources
- Minyona publishes $50 to $200 per qualified lead and $200 to $400 per booked appointment, with a one-time $2,000 setup and no monthly retainer. Minyona.
- Research on online sales leads found that most companies are not responding nearly fast enough to inbound queries. Harvard Business Review, March 2011.
Read next
- How These Comparisons Are ResearchedWhere the numbers on the comparison pages come from, how vendors are picked and ranked, how often it's rechecked, and the conflict of interest in all of it.
- What This Costs, and How the Math WorksHow the money works: a one time setup, then a flat fee per qualified inspection that happens, no retainer, and ad spend that goes to the platform on your own card.
- Break-Even Calculator for a Booked InspectionThe most you can pay for one booked inspection before the job stops paying, worked out from your job value, margin, show rate and close rate.