Shared Leads, Exclusive Leads, Pay-Per-Call and Your Own Calls: A Plumber's Comparison

Plumbing leads reach you four ways: shared leads sold to several companies, exclusive leads sold to you alone, pay-per-call where you pay for a live call that meets a set length, and your own calls from your Google profile, website and past customers. Price per lead is the number every vendor wants to talk about. The number that runs your business is cost per booked job, and that swings hard depending on how many other plumbers are calling the same homeowner.

Four sources side by side

Source	Who else gets it	How you pay	Who holds the customer
Shared lead	Several other companies, often at the same moment	Per lead, booked or not	The platform first, you if you win the job
Exclusive lead	Only you, if the contract means what it says	Per lead, usually at a higher price	Mostly you
Pay-per-call	Usually only you, for that call	Per qualifying call, often by call length	You, but the vendor controls the number
Your own calls	Nobody	Your marketing costs, spread over every call	You

Shared leads

A homeowner fills out a form on a marketplace. The platform passes the request to several plumbers who cover that ZIP code and job type. HomeAdvisor and Angi have long worked roughly this way, though models and terms change, so go by the current written agreement rather than what a sales rep says on the phone.

What it means on the ground: the homeowner gets several calls within minutes. The first shop to reach them has an edge, and price shopping is built into the process. Shared leads aren't worthless. If your office answers fast and your techs sell well, they can fill holes in a slow week. But you're paying for a chance to compete, not for a job.

Exclusive leads

Exclusive should mean the lead goes to you and nobody else, and it costs more per lead because of that. Check two things in the agreement: whether exclusivity covers the same homeowner coming in through a different form on the same vendor's network, and how long it lasts. Some contracts define exclusive very narrowly. The word on the sales sheet and the definition in the fine print aren't always the same.

Pay-per-call

A vendor runs ads or directory listings, sends the calls through a tracking number, and forwards them to your office. You pay for each call that meets the vendor's definition of qualified, usually a minimum length. The call arrives live, which is the good part: the homeowner is on the line and ready to talk.

The catches live in the definitions. With a short length threshold, a wrong number that takes a minute to sort out can count. A caller from outside your service area can count. Someone asking about work you don't do can count, unless the contract says otherwise.

Your own calls

These come from your Google Business Profile, the Map Pack, your website ranking for searches like "water heater replacement" plus your town, repeat customers and referrals. Nobody else is bidding on that homeowner at that moment. They searched, saw your name and called you.

Your own calls aren't free. You pay for the website, the SEO work, photos, the review process and the office time to keep it all current. But the cost doesn't climb with every call, and the asset stays yours if you stop paying anyone.

Cost per booked job: the math that matters

Price per lead hides the real cost. Here's a made-up example to show the method. These are not market prices:

• Shared leads: say each lead costs $40 and you book 1 in 5. That's $200 per booked job.
• Exclusive leads: say each lead costs $90 and you book 1 in 2. That's $180 per booked job.
• Pay-per-call: say each qualifying call costs $70 and you book 1 in 3. That's $210 per booked job.
• Your own calls: take what you spend in a month on the website, SEO and reviews, and divide by the jobs those channels booked that month. The spend stays roughly flat; the job count is what moves.

Plug in your own numbers. The point isn't which source wins in the example. It's that you need three figures from your own office for every source: what you paid, how many leads or calls came in, and how many became booked jobs. Then look at average ticket by source too, because a source that books a lot of faucet cartridges isn't the same as one that books water heater replacements and sewer lines.

Getting those figures means the office asks "how did you hear about us?" on every call and writes the answer down, or you use call tracking that separates sources. Without that, every vendor's report looks good and you're guessing.

Contract traps to read for

Before you sign with any lead vendor, look for these in the agreement:

• Auto-renewal. Many agreements renew on their own unless you cancel in writing inside a window. Put the date on the office calendar the day you sign.
• Minimum term or minimum spend. A three or six month minimum means paying through the slow season even when the leads are poor.
• Credit and dispute windows. Vendors often credit bad leads, but only if you dispute within a set number of days and with a reason from their list. If nobody in the office checks, you pay for every wrong number.
• Who owns the phone number. With pay-per-call and some managed listing services, the vendor owns the tracking number. When you leave, customers who saved that number reach someone else, or nobody.
• Who owns the listing or page. Some vendors build a page or profile under your company name that they control. Ask in writing what happens to it when you cancel.
• Area and job type controls. Make sure you can limit leads to the towns and jobs you actually want. Drain leads two counties away aren't a bargain at any price.

How most shops end up mixing them

Plenty of plumbing companies run more than one source at a time. A common pattern: bought leads fill the schedule while the company is new or the profile is thin, and as the Map Pack and website start producing, the paid sources get trimmed back to the job types or towns where they still earn their cost.

That shift doesn't happen by itself. It takes a profile with real reviews, a website with a page for each job you want, and enough months for both to rank. Our plumbing leads page explains how we approach building calls you own alongside whatever you're buying today.

One useful starting point is seeing how your Map Pack visibility stacks up against the shops that are getting the calls now. The Map Pack calculator gives you a quick read on the gap.