Every handyman who has used Thumbtack knows the feeling. You pay for a lead. So do four other guys. The homeowner picks whoever answers first and quotes lowest, and you spend the afternoon talking yourself down on price — on a job you already paid to bid for.
One of our clients, Better Call Mike, ran his whole business that way. Then he gave us the same budget and we spent it somewhere else. Six months on each side, $5,000 of ad spend on each side. Here is what came back.
What $5,000 on Thumbtack bought
173 leads at $28.90 each. 22.5% of them became booked work — about 39 jobs.
Which puts the number that actually matters at $128 per booked job.
What $5,000 on Facebook bought
Rather than one budget chasing whatever came in, we split it across three campaigns, one for each service he offers:
| Campaign | Spend | Leads | Per lead | Closed | Jobs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Handyman | $1,500 | 136 | $11.03 | 34% | 46 |
| TV mounting | $1,500 | 115 | $13.04 | 30% | 35 |
| Painting | $2,000 | 92 | $21.74 | 32% | 29 |
| Total | $5,000 | 343 | $14.58 | — | 110 |
343 leads instead of 173. 110 jobs instead of 39. $45 a job instead of $128.
Same money, same six months, nearly three times the work.
About that $5,000
It is ad spend. Running the campaigns is a separate cost, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — Thumbtack's $5,000 was all-in.
But do the arithmetic before you decide that closes the gap. Thumbtack delivered 39 jobs for $5,000. Facebook delivered 110. Even loading a management fee on top, you would need to spend thousands more before the cost per job came anywhere near $128. The gap is too wide for a fee to swallow.
Why the leads also closed better
Cheaper leads are the obvious half. The conversion rate is the interesting half — 30% to 34% against 22.5% — and it comes down to who called whom.
A Thumbtack lead is not yours. It is sold to several contractors at once, and everybody in the conversation knows it. You are negotiating from behind before you open your mouth, because the homeowner is holding three other quotes that landed in the same hour. The pressure to take the job pushes your price down.
A lead from your own ad saw your name, your work, your reviews — and chose to call you. There is no race. You quote your price instead of underbidding somebody else's.
And the part that never shows up in a lead count
Those three campaigns also delivered 154,008 impressions and reached 77,259 people in his service area, with his name on them.
Thumbtack gives you none of that. You pay for a lead, you get a lead, and the homeowner remembers Thumbtack. Every dollar builds their brand. The people who saw Mike's ads and did not call this month still know who he is when a ceiling fan comes down in March.
The campaign that did not win by much
Painting came in at $21.74 a lead — close to Thumbtack, and the weakest of the three. We are including it because it is real, and because it is the useful one.
It still closed at 32% against Thumbtack's 22.5%, so even the worst campaign bought cheaper jobs. Not every service performs the same. Anyone showing you three wins and no misses is selling something.
What this is, and what it is not
One contractor, one market, one budget, six months, Facebook only — we have not touched Google for him yet. It is not proof this works for everyone and we will not pretend it is.
Worth saying what is not in these figures: his Google Business Profile, set up around the same time, brought another 18 enquiries in its first month and cost nothing at all.
What it shows is what happened when a handyman stopped renting leads and started running ads with his own name on them.
Figures provided by Better Call Mike and published with his permission.