Thumbtack Ads diagnostics for service businesses.

A marketplace lead is not a search lead, and pricing them the same is the most common way money leaks here. When someone searches and finds you, they came for you, and in one account that lead closed around 60%. The same trade's lead off a shared marketplace closed around 20%, because two competitors quoted before you opened the app. Same job, same crew, a third of the conversion — so a Thumbtack lead is worth roughly a third of what a search lead is worth, and your maximum bid has to say so.

That makes response speed an economic input, not a service-quality nicety: the pro who answers first is usually the one quoting against nobody. Before adding budget we check the boring things that decide it — who actually sees the notification, how fast a quote goes out, what share of leads were never your job in the first place, and whether the ones you disputed came back out of both the cost and the count. Get that wrong and your reported cost per lead is overstated against a channel that may be fine.

Response speed is the part owners underrate. On a marketplace the homeowner has messaged several companies at once, so the quote that arrives first competes against silence and the one that arrives tomorrow competes against a job already booked. We time that handoff, because no bid adjustment recovers an hour lost after the lead lands. Then the close-rate arithmetic runs: leads in, quotes out, jobs won, margin left. If it says the channel cannot pay for itself at any bid, we say so and the budget moves to one that can.