Shared, Exclusive or Pay-Per-Call: Reading a Lead Vendor's Offer

Shared leads go to several pest control companies at once, so they usually cost less per lead and are harder to win. Exclusive leads go only to you and cost more per lead. Pay-per-call charges you for live phone calls that meet the vendor's definition of billable, which puts you on the line with someone who already wanted to talk. Which one is cheapest for your company comes down to one number you can work out from your own invoices: what you pay for each customer who signs a recurring plan.

Buying leads has a place in a pest control business. A new route, a new town, or a spring with more technician hours than customers are all fair reasons to buy. What matters is knowing what you're getting and doing the math on plans, not on leads.

How the three types compare

	Shared leads	Exclusive leads	Pay-per-call
What arrives	A form fill: name, phone, pest	A form fill: name, phone, pest	A live call sent to your line
Who else gets it	Other buyers in your area, often within minutes	Nobody, if the vendor keeps its word	Nobody, on that call
What you pay for	Each lead delivered	Each lead delivered	Each call that meets the billable rule
Main risk	Racing other companies to a price shopper	Paying extra and still getting weak leads	Billable calls that aren't real prospects
Works well when	Your office can call back in minutes	You're filling a new route or testing a town	Someone answers every call live

With shared leads, speed matters most. The homeowner filled out one form and is about to hear from several companies, and the first one to reach them with a clear answer has the advantage. Expect price comparisons: someone who gets four calls in an hour is shopping. Your edges are a fast callback, a plan you can explain in two sentences, and reviews they can check while you're talking.

Exclusive leads take the race away but not the quality questions. A homeowner who filled out a form on a "get free quotes" site may not remember which site it was, or expect your company to be the one calling, so open with who you are and what they asked about. Exclusivity is a promise from the vendor, so ask how they keep it.

Pay-per-call sends a caller straight to your phone, usually from the vendor's own ads or websites. You pay when a call meets the vendor's billable rule, which is often a minimum call length and sometimes a check on service area or repeat callers. A call that runs long because the caller wanted wildlife work you don't do can still count. The model rewards companies whose phones are answered live by someone who can book on the spot, and it punishes voicemail.

Questions to ask before you sign

1. Where do your leads come from: your own websites, paid ads, a call center, or other lead sellers?
2. For shared leads, how many companies get each one, and do they all get it at the same moment?
3. Can I filter by ZIP code, by pest, and by residential versus commercial?
4. What counts as a bad lead, how do I dispute one, and how many days do I have?
5. For calls, what makes a call billable, and can I hear the recordings?
6. Do your ads or pages use my company name? Who owns the phone number the customer sees?
7. Is there a minimum monthly spend, a contract term, or a notice period to cancel?
8. Can I pause in the slow months without losing my territory?

Write the answers down and keep them with the contract. A vendor who answers all eight plainly is easier to work with when a dispute comes up in July.

The math: what each recurring customer costs

Two formulas do most of the work:

• Cost per sale = cost per lead ÷ close rate
• Cost per recurring customer = cost per sale ÷ share of sales that sign a plan

Here are three vendors with numbers invented purely to show the arithmetic. They aren't market prices, and yours will be different. Put in your own invoices and your own office's close rates.

• Vendor A, shared leads: $30 per lead. You close one in six, and half of those sign a plan. Cost per sale: $180. Cost per recurring customer: $360.
• Vendor B, exclusive leads: $75 per lead. You close one in three, and six in ten sign a plan. Cost per sale: $225. Cost per recurring customer: $375.
• Vendor C, pay-per-call: $60 per billable call. You close two in five, and half sign a plan. Cost per sale: $150. Cost per recurring customer: $300.

In this example the cheapest lead wasn't the cheapest customer, and the gaps are small enough that one change flips the order. Say the office starts calling shared leads back within five minutes instead of an hour, and the close rate on Vendor A moves from one in six to one in four. Cost per sale drops to $120, cost per recurring customer drops to $240, and the shared vendor is now the cheapest of the three. Your office's speed is part of the price of every lead you buy.

Two adjustments make the number more honest. Count the leads you had to throw out but couldn't get credited, because you paid for them. And give one-time customers some value instead of zero: a one-time job still covers its own cost, and some of those customers join a plan later. Track how many convert over a season and fold that in.

Then put the cost per recurring customer next to what a plan customer is worth to you over the years they stay: the initial service, the scheduled visits and the add-ons, counted as gross profit rather than revenue. If a plan customer is worth several times what a channel charges you to win one, the channel is worth buying, even when the price per lead looks high.

What changes when you own the rankings

Bought leads are rented. The month you stop paying, they stop, and next month's price is whatever the vendor sets. Rankings you build behave differently. When your own pages and your Google Business Profile show up for "pest control near me" or "termite inspection [your town]", the homeowner picked you from the results, nobody else got a copy of the lead, and each extra call from that page costs you nothing more.

Rankings aren't free and they aren't fast. They take months, they depend on how competitive your towns are, and nobody can promise a position. The math is simple even when the timeline isn't. Say you spend a fixed amount on search each month, call it S, and after the first several months it brings in N plan customers a month. Your cost per recurring customer from search is S ÷ N, and N can keep growing while S stays the same. In the early months N is close to zero, so search looks expensive. Later, the same spend is spread over more customers. A price per lead doesn't come down that way, because every new customer is a new purchase.

That's why plenty of companies run both for a while: buy leads to keep routes full while search builds, keep buying in towns you can't rank in yet, and scale back as search customers start showing up in your own records. We go through the owned side in more detail on our page about pest control leads from your own search rankings.

Track the source of every plan customer

None of this works without clean source data. Tag each new customer by where they came from at signup: the vendor's name, search, referral, door-to-door, the truck. Use separate tracking numbers and tagged forms where you can, because "how did you hear about us" is often a guess by the time the customer is asked. After a full season, rank your sources by cost per recurring customer and decide which to keep.

Before you renew a lead contract, it's worth knowing what your own search presence could take over. Our free search audit shows where you appear now and which searches in your towns are going to someone else.