Is marketplace spend better than owned channels?

The comparison is almost always run on the wrong unit. A marketplace quotes cost per lead, and it is a real number, precisely calculated and entirely useless on its own — because it omits the single term that decides whether the spend was worthwhile, which is the share of those leads that become jobs. Two channels with identical costs per lead can differ by a factor of several in cost per booked job, and nothing in the quoted figure would tell you which one you are buying.

Cost per booked job is straightforward to construct and requires one input the marketplace does not have: your close rate on their leads. Take what you paid, divide by the jobs that actually resulted. That is the number to compare against anything else, and it is the number the marketplace cannot publish, because it depends on how fast you respond, which trades you cover, how you price and whether the lead was shared.

The shared-lead structure is what makes the gap between the two figures large rather than marginal. When the same enquiry is sold to several contractors at once, each copy carries the full fee and only one copy can become a job. The fee is charged per copy and the outcome is decided among all of them, so the effective cost of a booked job rises with the number of contractors the lead was sold to — a term that appears in the marketplace's distribution policy and never in its pricing page.

Owned channels have the opposite shape and it is the reason the comparison is hard rather than the reason it is one-sided. They cost more up front, they take months to produce anything, and the early cost per booked job is genuinely terrible. What they have is compounding: the enquiry arrives unshared, the asset that produced it keeps producing, and the marginal cost of the next enquiry falls. A marketplace fee does the reverse, staying flat forever and never accruing to anything you own.

Which is why the sensible answer for most contractors is a split with a defined job rather than a winner. Marketplace spend is the right instrument for filling capacity now, for entering a new service area where you have no presence, and for smoothing a seasonal trough — all uses where immediacy is the point and compounding is irrelevant. Owned channels are the right instrument for the base load. Buying marketplace leads to cover a permanent shortfall in the base load is the failure mode, because it is a variable cost that never converts into an asset and grows with the business.

The measurement that makes this actionable is unglamorous. Tag lead source on every job, record time to first contact, and read cost per booked job by source each quarter. Most contractors have never separated the two populations, which is why the debate is conducted with opinions when a quarter of tagging would settle it.