Are Angi Leads Worth It? The Arithmetic to Run Before You Renew

Every contractor who has bought leads has had the same argument with themselves at renewal time. The invoice is real and easy to see. The jobs are harder to attribute, and the memory of the ones that went nowhere is louder than the ones that closed.

This page does not tell you that lead platforms are a scam, and it does not tell you they are good value. Both of those claims are made constantly by people who do not know your numbers. What follows is the arithmetic that answers it for your business specifically, and what to do with either answer.

The only four numbers that matter

Pull the last three months. Not last month, because one big job distorts it, and not last year, because prices and competition have moved.

1. What you paid the platform, total, including any membership or subscription on top of the per-lead charges.
2. How many leads you received for that money.
3. How many of those became paying jobs.
4. The gross profit on those jobs. Gross profit, not revenue. What was left after materials, subcontractors, and the labour hours that job consumed. If you do not track this per job, use your normal margin on that type of work, and be honest rather than optimistic.

Three of those four are on statements you already have. The fourth is the one people skip, and skipping it is how a channel that loses money survives for years.

The two divisions

Cost per job won. Total paid, divided by jobs won. If you spent a certain amount over three months and it produced six jobs, that spend divided by six is what each of those jobs cost you to acquire, including every lead that went nowhere. Those wasted leads are not overhead to be waved away, they are part of the price of the jobs you got.

Cost per job won, against gross profit per job. This is the whole decision. If acquiring a job costs a small fraction of what the job leaves behind, the channel is working and the invoice is not the problem. If it costs something close to half, you are working for the privilege of working. If it is above the gross profit, the channel is taking money out of the business every month and calling it marketing.

There is no universal threshold, because a business doing a small number of large installs can carry a much higher acquisition cost than one doing high volume at a low ticket. But once you have the two figures side by side, you will not need anybody to tell you which situation you are in.

The three questions the arithmetic will not answer

Is the win rate falling? Do the same division for each of the last three months separately rather than as one lump. A lead channel that is getting worse looks fine in aggregate and obvious month by month. A falling win rate on a steady lead price usually means more contractors are receiving the same lead.

Are the jobs getting smaller? Average job value from bought leads, compared with the average job value from customers who called you directly. When people ask why bought leads "feel" worse, this is often what they are feeling. A platform sends what its users request, and the people using a marketplace to find a contractor are frequently price shopping, which is a different customer from the one who was referred to you by a neighbour.

What happens to the customer afterwards? This is the one that does not show up in any month's numbers. A customer who found you through a marketplace often stays a customer of the marketplace. When their next problem happens, they go back to the app rather than to your number. A customer who found you through your own listing or site has your name in their phone. Over a few years, that difference is larger than any per-lead price.

If the numbers say the channel is working

Then keep it, and stop feeling bad about the invoice. A channel that returns several times its cost in gross profit is not a problem to solve.

Do two things anyway.

Re-run the arithmetic every quarter. The economics of bought leads change without notice, from their side, and by the time it feels wrong you have usually funded several bad months.

Start building the channels you own, while you can afford to be patient. A complete Google Business Profile and a website that answers the caller's real questions take weeks to months to produce anything. Building them while the bought leads are still paying is a much better position than starting them the month you cancel.

If the numbers say it is not working

Do not cancel first. Build first, then let the spend fall.

The two things that reliably produce calls for a local service business, and that nobody can price you out of, are:

Your Google Business Profile. Most local service searches are decided on the map results and the profile behind them, before anybody visits a website. If yours is thin, the fastest available improvement in your entire marketing is finishing it. Google Business Profile for contractors is the working list, and how to get reviews for your business covers the part of it that moves the needle most.

A site that turns a visitor into a call. Not a brochure. A phone number visible without scrolling, the towns you actually serve named on the page, the answers to the two or three questions every caller asks before they book. If you have a site and it produces nothing, why your website is not getting calls is the diagnosis, and our free site check will tell you what is missing on yours in about a minute, with no email address and nothing stored.

For the specific trade playbooks, how to get more plumbing leads and how to get more HVAC leads go through the sequence in order, including which parts genuinely have to wait on somebody else and which you can do this week.

The honest summary

Bought leads are rented demand. They are fast, they work immediately, and the price is set by somebody whose interest is in raising it. Owned channels are slow, they take real work to establish, and once established they get cheaper rather than dearer and the customer belongs to you.

Almost every local service business should be doing some of both, and should know the numbers well enough to say which direction the balance is moving. The failure case is not buying leads. It is buying them for years without ever running the division, and never starting the thing that would have made them optional.

If you want the division done for you rather than on the back of an envelope, our free cost per lead calculator takes what you paid, the leads, the jobs and the gross profit and returns your cost per job won, the share of a job's profit it is eating, and the most a lead can cost before it stops being worth buying. It runs in your browser with no email field and nothing stored.

The longer argument for owning your demand rather than renting it, written for exactly this audience, is The Small Town Strategy.