Own Website or Lead Marketplace: The Comparison

Comparing the two channels takes four figures that every firm already has: the sum of marketplace fees per month, the number of enquiries received through them, the conversion rate and the contribution margin of an average job. It matters to track the conversion rate per channel. Enquiries from a marketplace and enquiries from your own site behave differently, and a shared average blurs exactly the difference in question. The scheme below can be filled in with your own values in a few minutes.

Two points are frequently overlooked. First, the conversion rate drops as soon as several firms work on the same enquiry: five such contacts produce noticeably fewer jobs than five enquiries arriving directly at the firm (project experience). Second, the price of your own website spreads across its useful life. A site that carries three or four years costs less per month than the one-off invoice suggests, and that amount stays the same whether two or twenty enquiries come in during a month.

An honest calculation also includes your own working time. Every enquiry ties up a site visit, travel, an evening spent on the quote and the follow-up email. Those hours appear on no marketplace invoice, yet they are the larger cost block as soon as the conversion rate is low. Anyone writing three quotes to win one job pays for two of them out of the margin of the third. That is precisely why it pays to judge the quality of enquiries rather than only their number: one well-prepared enquiry with a budget range and a date is worth several vague contacts.

The quietest cost item of a marketplace is the customer relationship. Enquiry, follow-up questions and scheduling run through the portal inbox. The firm sees a name and a location, sometimes only after unlocking the contact, and the terms of use govern what may happen with that data. Some portals explicitly forbid continuing the contact outside the platform or advertising to those customers later. That is legitimate, since it is exactly where the business model sits, but a firm should be aware of it before planning the channel as a replacement for its own acquisition.

For a landscaping business this weighs especially heavily, because the trade lives on repetition. Whoever built the terrace later builds the fence, takes on the green maintenance, adds the cistern and handles winter service. Those follow-up jobs grow out of a maintained address base, out of the note about the last pruning and out of a phone number the customer still has. If the marketplace contract ends or the fee rises, access to that channel ends, whereas your own customer list and your own site remain in place regardless.

On your own site the situation differs, though it is not automatically simpler. The requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation apply there too: an enquiry form collects personal data, needs an understandable privacy notice, a sparing choice of fields and orderly retention. The difference is responsibility. The firm decides for itself which data it collects, how long it stores it and what it uses it for, instead of finding those questions answered in someone else's terms of use.

The decision is rarely marketplace or website but which role each channel gets. A marketplace suits clearly bounded tasks: opening up a new catchment area, making a newly built trade known, filling a gap in late summer or starting a first season with winter service. All of these are about fast, limited demand, and for that a channel with immediate effect fits. Which service is promoted when can be spread across the year with considered seasonal planning for the website.

What a marketplace does not suit is carrying the permanent base load. Anyone drawing the bulk of their jobs from it depends on price, visibility and customer contact set by someone else. A price adjustment, a changed distribution logic or a new competitor in the area then affect capacity directly. Your own channel grows more slowly, but it stays, and it becomes cheaper per enquiry over the years because the fixed cost remains while the number of enquiries increases.

For firms with full order books the question looks different. Here it is not about more enquiries but about better ones. Anyone working every marketplace enquiry while the crews are booked into autumn gives away costing time and ends up lowering prices instead of holding them. In that situation your own channel is the stronger lever, because it attracts enquiries that match the firm's services and area rather than delivering contacts that come out of a radius filter.

Changing channels in the middle of the season is needlessly risky. It works better to build during the quiet period between November and February, when there is time for photos, texts and coordination and the site can take effect by spring. The marketplace keeps running through this phase but is managed with a fixed budget and evaluated. That way no hole opens up in the order book while your own channel picks up speed.

One pattern shows up often in this review: your own site brings fewer enquiries at the start than the marketplace, but the conversion rate is higher, because the customer has already seen work and chosen this firm deliberately (project experience). Across a season the balance therefore shifts more than the raw enquiry count suggests. That is why enquiry volume alone is a misleading yardstick; only contribution margin and quoting effort give a reliable picture.

In the end this is a business decision, not a technical one. A marketplace buys time and delivers contacts for as long as it is paid. Your own channel costs lead time and then delivers enquiries, addresses and reviews that belong to the firm. Anyone measuring both with the same four figures can decide anew each year how much weight each route gets, instead of relying on a feeling.