Are bought leads better than your own advertising?

A large part of this industry's demand is bought from lead vendors, often shared with two or three competitors, and speed of response decides who wins the job. Those vendors report on leads delivered, because leads are the product.

That leaves the mover comparing a vendor's cost per lead against their own cost per lead, when the question they need answered is cost per invoiced job. Two sources delivering leads at the same price can differ by more than double on close rate and average invoice.

Reconciling booked and invoiced jobs against the lead export answers it directly, and it does so using files both sides already produce. It is the one comparison that is not in either party's marketing material.

An interstate move invoices thousands of dollars and is quoted, surveyed and booked weeks ahead. A local move invoices a few hundred and books in days. They share a brand, a phone number and frequently a Google Ads account.

Blending them produces an average job value that describes neither, and it makes the channels that bring the large moves look the same as the ones that bring the small ones. A move-type column separates them so each can be funded on its own numbers.

Interstate moving is one of the most concentrated seasonal businesses there is. School calendars, lease ends and closing dates push the great majority of household moves into late spring and summer, and by July a good operation is turning work away because there is no truck, no crew or no space on a trailer. In February the same company is bidding hard for whatever is available. Nothing about the marketing calendar reflects this. The spend tends to be level while the capacity to deliver anything is not.

A channel's value therefore depends entirely on when it delivers. Demand bought in June competes with demand the company already had and may simply displace a job it would have booked anyway at a better price. The identical spend in January fills a week that would otherwise have been empty. Cost per lead cannot see the difference and will recommend the same budget in both months. Buying demand you cannot serve is not neutral either, because a survey done for a job you turn down still costs an estimator's afternoon.

Exporting the booking date and the move date alongside the invoice lets the report be run on the shoulder months separately from the peak. What tends to emerge is that the sources worth buying in the quiet season are not the ones that dominate the summer, and that some summer spend is buying work the company could not deliver anyway. It is the sort of finding that changes the shape of an annual plan rather than the bids inside one campaign, which is why it is worth running the report before the budget is set.

Long-distance bookings cancel. The house sale falls through, the job offer is withdrawn, a competitor comes back cheaper the week before, or the family decides to rent a truck after all. Deposits are taken partly to reduce this and they do not eliminate it. Cancellation rates differ sharply between sources, and they are highest exactly where the enquiry was cheapest and least considered. A summer cancellation is worse still, because the slot it occupied was one of the few genuinely scarce things the business sells.

Reporting on booked jobs therefore rewards the sources that are worst at producing actual moves. It is a particularly damaging error in this industry because a cancelled booking also consumed a survey, a crew slot and dispatch capacity that could have been sold to somebody else, so the cost is not merely the lost revenue. Sales teams know their fall-out rate as a single blended figure and almost never as a figure per source, which is the version that would actually change a purchasing decision.

Ranking on invoiced jobs removes the flattery entirely. A booking that cancelled bills nothing and credits nothing, and uploading the booked-job file alongside the invoiced one shows the fall-out rate per source as a straightforward ratio. For most movers that ratio, rather than the cost per lead, is the number that decides which vendor contract gets renewed. It is also a number both parties can check, which makes the conversation with a lead vendor a different kind of conversation. A cancellation rate that differs by fifteen points between two vendors is not a detail to be negotiated around; it is the whole difference between them.

An agent booking a move under a van line's brand keeps a commission and remits the rest. The same company selling the same move under its own name keeps the whole invoice and carries the whole liability. Both appear in the accounts as a completed interstate job with a customer name and an amount, and both cost something to acquire, but what the company keeps is not remotely similar. A media report that treats the two as equivalent is measuring turnover rather than earnings, and turnover is not what pays for the trucks.

If both are exported at invoice value, the ranking measures the revenue that passed through the business rather than the revenue that stayed in it. A source feeding the van line's national advertising will look strong on a report that has no idea the commission structure exists, and the media budget will follow it accordingly. The company ends up subsidising the network's demand generation with its own advertising budget, on the strength of a figure that looked perfectly reasonable in the spreadsheet.

Export what the company retains, or export both with a business-type column, and the comparison becomes honest. It also answers a question most agents have views about and no evidence for: whether their own brand advertising earns more per job than the work that arrives through the network, once the split is taken into account. Agents frequently suspect the answer already; what they have not had is a figure per job, per source, that somebody else in the business will accept.