There is no single number, and here is why
Every agency that publishes a flat price per lead is either averaging across wildly different trades or quoting the cheapest thing they sell. Neither helps you work out what your enquiries should cost.
What actually determines the price is a handful of variables, and once you know them you can sanity-check any quote — ours included — in about five minutes.
The variables that move the number
| Driver | Pushes price up | Pushes price down |
|---|---|---|
| Job value | Demolition, restoration, major landscaping | Mowing, basic wash-and-vac, small repairs |
| Search volume in the territory | Thin regional demand, hard to fill | Dense metro demand, plenty of enquiries |
| Competition for the keywords | Crowded metro trades with heavy ad spend | Thin fields such as demolition |
| Urgency of intent | Emergency work, same-day decisions | Planned or discretionary purchases |
| Exclusivity | One business per territory | Shared, resold to several operators |
| Territory size | A wide catchment held out of the market | A tight cluster of postcodes |
| Lead type | Answered phone calls with a recording | Unverified form fills |
Read that table alongside the industries page and you can predict roughly where your trade will sit before you ever speak to us.
Work out your own ceiling first
This is the single most useful thing you can do, and it takes ten minutes.
Take your average job value. Multiply it by the proportion of warm enquiries you turn into booked work. That product is what one enquiry is worth to your business. If you bill an average job at a few thousand dollars and close one in three enquiries, one enquiry is worth several hundred to you — and paying a small fraction of that per lead is obviously sound, while paying most of it is obviously not.
The full method, including the mistakes people make with it, is in what a lead is worth. Do it before you ring anyone. It is the difference between negotiating and being quoted at.
What you are and are not paying for
On the lead generation service you are paying for qualified enquiries in your postcodes, exclusive to you, delivered live. You are not paying for the domain, the website, the ad spend or the ranking work — we carry all of that, which is why there is no setup fee and why we lose money if the campaigns fail. That structure is explained properly in why rank-and-rent works.
You are also not acquiring an asset. When you stop, the enquiries stop. If you want to own something at the end of it, that is the local SEO service and it is priced as a monthly engagement rather than per lead, because there the risk and the ownership both sit with you.
The other services
Websites for trades is quoted as a fixed project price once we know how many service pages and locations are involved. The AI answering service is a monthly fee with a per-call component, and it is the one service where we can usually tell you on the first call whether it will pay for itself, because the arithmetic is simply your missed call rate multiplied by your average job value.
Before you spend anything
If your close rate is poor, your callback times are slow, or your territory has thin demand, buying leads at any price will lose you money. When pay-per-lead is the wrong model is the list of those situations, published deliberately.
For a figure specific to your trade and postcodes, contact us or call 0468 062 773 with your average job value and close rate to hand.
Frequently asked questions
Why will you not publish a price list?
Because a single figure would mislead most people reading it. A demolition enquiry in metro Perth and a car detailing enquiry in a regional town differ by an order of magnitude in what they are worth and what they cost to generate. A published rate would be wrong for nearly everyone and would exist to look transparent rather than to be useful.
Is there a setup fee or a minimum term?
No setup fee on the lead service and no minimum term. You pay for leads received, month to month. We carry the cost of building and ranking the assets, which is the whole basis of the arrangement. Local SEO and website work are quoted differently because there you own what is built.
Is there a monthly minimum spend?
There is usually a minimum lead volume for a territory, because holding postcodes out of the market has a cost to us. If you only want three leads a month, an exclusive territory is not the right product and we will say so rather than taking a small commitment and under-servicing it.
How do I know I am not being overcharged?
Work out your own ceiling before you ask anyone for a price. Multiply your average job value by your close rate on warm enquiries — that is what one enquiry is worth to you. Anything approaching that figure is a bad deal. Anything well under it is worth considering, from us or anyone else.