- Count cost per closed job, not cost per lead. Shared marketplace leads at 5–15% close can cost more per job than “expensive” exclusive channels.
- LSA is the best paid starting point for most fence companies: pay-per-lead, ~44% reported close, powered by the reviews you should build anyway.
- Referrals and reviews are a system, not luck. The ask has to be consistent and compliant.
- Owned visibility (Maps, rankings, AI answers) is the only channel that compounds. Slowest to start, cheapest per job by year two.
Channel-by-channel: the honest math
Numbers below are published ranges, checked July 2026, full sourcing on the Cost page:
| CHANNEL | THE MATH | VERDICT |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplaces (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack) | Leads sold to multiple contractors; 5–15% typical close. A “$40 lead” at 10% close = $400 per job, before the race-to-the-phone tax. | Fine as filler capacity. Fatal as a foundation, the platform owns the customer and the price only moves up. |
| Local Services Ads | ~$53/lead cross-trade average, pay-per-lead, ~44% reported close. Ranking driven by reviews + response speed. | Start here for paid. Every review you earn makes it cheaper, the rare paid channel your other work improves. |
| Google Ads | Fencing CPCs $8–$25 ($25–$75+ high-intent); $75–$250 per lead. Exclusive, instant, and off the moment you stop paying. | A dial for gaps and new service areas, not a foundation. Demands real tracking or it quietly burns cash. |
| Referrals & reviews | Near-zero cash cost; the constraint is consistency. Every finished fence is a photo, a review ask, and a neighbor who watched the crew work. | The highest-close channel you have. Systematize the ask, same-day, sentiment-neutral, every job. |
| Owned visibility (Maps, SEO, AI answers) | Investment up front, compounding after: map positions, fence-type pages, and AI presence keep producing without per-lead fees. | The only channel where this year’s work makes next year cheaper. The exit ramp from renting. |
Escaping the marketplace treadmill, in order
First 30 days: stop the bleeding. Complete the Business Profile properly, start the compliant review cadence, fix the quote path (tappable number, short form, fast reply). These raise every channel’s close rate at once, including the marketplace leads you’re still buying.
Days 30–90: shift budget to LSA. As reviews build, LSA gets cheaper and steadier. Cap marketplace spend at whatever closes profitably by your own math, for most fence companies that’s a smaller number than they’re spending.
Months 2–6: build the owned layer. Service-area pages for the towns you actually cover, fence-type pages for the research phase, geo-grid tracking to watch the map change. This is where the compounding starts.
Quarter 2 onward: let the asset take share. As Maps, rankings, and AI answers produce, paid becomes a choice instead of a dependency. That’s the whole point: demand under your name, not rented under theirs.
What this playbook won’t do
It won’t fill next week’s schedule, nothing organic does, and anyone promising instant lead counts is selling you marketplace leads with extra steps. It won’t work without follow-up discipline: the best visibility in Georgia can’t close a quote request that waits two days for a callback. And it won’t run itself, which is either your evenings, or a program with a ledger you can audit.
No lead-count guarantees here, because honest people don’t make them. What’s measurable: qualified quote calls against a dated baseline, month over month.
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