Most event suppliers can tell you roughly what they spent on lead sites last year. Very few can tell you what it bought. The spend is a monthly card payment you stopped noticing; the return is spread across a year of enquiries, some of which would have found you anyway. This guide is one afternoon's arithmetic that turns the first number into a decision.
Three ways they charge
Nearly every paid channel is one of these three, and which one you are on decides who carries the risk when an enquiry goes nowhere.
| Model | How it works | Who carries the risk |
|---|---|---|
| Pay per lead, or credits | You pay to contact each enquiry, usually by buying credits up front. Sites such as Bark and Add to Event work broadly this way | You. You pay to respond, whether or not you are one of several, and whether or not the enquiry was real |
| Subscription or listing fee | A flat monthly or annual fee to be listed, with enquiries included | You, but predictably. The cost is the same in February as in June, which is the part that hurts in a seasonal trade |
| Commission on the booking | Free to list, a percentage taken when a booking is confirmed. Sites such as Poptop work broadly this way | Shared. You pay only on work won - but on your biggest jobs it is usually the most expensive of the three |
Rate cards change, so check the current terms directly rather than trusting a figure in an article - including this one. What does not change is the shape: a pay-per-lead site is selling you the contact, not the outcome, and its incentive is to send the same enquiry to several of you.
The only number that matters
Not cost per lead. Cost per booking, and cost per booking as a share of what the booking was worth. A £14 lead sounds cheap until you have paid for nine of them to win one £600 job.
The sum
Everything you paid that channel in a year, divided by the number of bookings you can trace to it. Then divide that by the average value of those bookings. The second number is the one to compare against your margin - if acquisition is eating more than your profit on the job, you are working to fund the channel.
Pull last year's numbers
Do it per channel, not in aggregate. The whole point is to find out which ones pay.
What the sum usually shows
- You are paying per response, not per booking. On a shared-lead model you are one of several quoting the same job, so your cost per booking is your cost per lead multiplied by everyone you lost to.
- A good slice of the spend went on leads you could never have served - wrong date, wrong area, wrong budget, wrong category - and you paid to find that out.
- The subscription ran all year; the enquiries did not. In a seasonal trade a flat fee is disproportionately expensive in the months it delivers nothing.
- Some of the work would have come anyway. Enquiries that found your own site, or came from a past client, sometimes get counted against a channel that merely happened to be running.
What to do with the answer
The answer is rarely "cancel everything". A channel whose cost per booking sits comfortably under your margin is doing its job, and dropping it in January to save money is how suppliers end up with a quiet spring. The useful moves are narrower:
- Keep any channel whose cost per booking is clearly under your margin, and stop apologising for the spend.
- Cut or pause the ones that are not, especially out of season - most are monthly.
- Before you blame the channel, check what you are sending it. A thin profile and a three-day reply lose jobs on any platform.
- Make sure at least one route to you costs nothing per enquiry, so a bad quarter does not also mean a bad bill.
Where we fit
Plan My Do is the fourth shape: a free profile, matched against what a host has actually described, with no per-lead charge and nobody bidding for position. A host tells us what they are planning and sees the suppliers that fit it. That does not make us a replacement for a channel that is demonstrably paying for itself - it makes us the one that costs nothing to keep running alongside it while you find out.
If you want the mechanism rather than the pitch, how Plan My Do matches suppliers to events sets out what a host's brief is actually scored against. For where else your business should be listed, see where to list your business. And the single cheapest change most suppliers can make is still putting your prices where people can see them.
Add a channel that costs nothing per enquiry
A free profile, matched on what hosts have described. No credits, no per-lead charge, and no bidding for position.
List your business