Shared Leads vs. Your Own Leads: What I Tell Every Contractor

Almost every contractor I meet has tried a lead site. Some still use one. And almost all of them tell me some version of the same thing: “I’m paying for leads, but I’m not winning the jobs.”

A shared lead is a race

On many lead sites, one homeowner’s request goes to several contractors at once. You pay whether you win or not. The job usually goes to whoever calls first and quotes lowest, which is how good contractors end up in a race to the bottom.

And sometimes the lead isn’t even what it claims to be. In 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million to service providers, saying it misrepresented lead quality, including leads outside contractors’ service areas or for the wrong type of work.

Your own leads compound

Your own leads come from things with your name on them: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your website, and ads that run in your name. Nobody else gets a copy. Even when you pay for them, like Google’s Local Services Ads, the homeowner is calling you, not a list of five contractors. They take longer to build, but every review and every job photo keeps working for you next year.

That’s where we put our effort for the contractors we work with, and it’s why most of them have stayed with us for years. Here’s what that looked like for two of them, from their own Google profiles, Google ads and Facebook ads:

Results from current Fillay clients, shown without names. Counts come from their lead records.

Should you quit lead sites today?

Not necessarily. If one is paying for itself, keep it while you build. But track it honestly: how many leads, how many jobs, what each job cost you. Then put a little more into the things you own every month. Most contractors I talk to are surprised how quickly their own Google leads catch up.