Home Advisor, get yourself on there

Matt; My carpet cleaner wrote:

Davey Cracker wrote:

Matt; My carpet cleaner wrote:Find some young stay at home moms that like to gab: Facebook, face to face or what ever; offer her a % of each paying job.

How does that work for you??

My experience is it only last a short time (A job or two), and then they slack off and nothing............But that was a long time ago, pre-interwebs era.....maybe those soccer mom's have changed?

From what I've seen..very good. There is a PM group owned and run by 5 Ladies. They are going gang busters. Think about this? Women to women service. Most of the time we are dealing with the Lady of the house.  Want an advantage; get a women involved. Answer phones, billing, QC phone calls.

Totally agree, having a woman in the mix would help.

Based on this post, I signed up for HA over the weekend to give it a try. So far they have sent me five leads. I have tried to call each of them back within two minutes of receiving the inquiry. None of them answered his phone, and none have returned calls. I also tried to e-mail them - no response.

Kind of hard to shell out $13 - $30 per lead and not have the opportunity to sell my service... Gonna give it a couple of more days, if nothing changes, I'm cancelling my account.

Not bashing them, but find it pretty weird/suspicious that I haven't been able to get in touch with anyone referred by HA.

Yeah keep us posted Joe. Have you requested a refund on those leads?

Not all leads will be golden, but it is odd to strike out on every one so far.

Do give us an update on how it progresses.

ACpower1 wrote:Home advisor doesnt mess with seo,   its no different than when you google your business name and you see your yelp ad up there near the top.   

In a small market you can help boost a referral service site. I rank pretty for my l.  Months ago I signed up for Yelp gave a back link. A  couple of months later they are ranking in the top ten for my area. They had never ranked in my area prior to that sign up and I haven't gotten sqaut from them.

carpetdaddy wrote:Based on this post, I signed up for HA over the weekend to give it a try. So far they have sent me five leads. I have tried to call each of them back within two minutes of receiving the inquiry. None of them answered his phone, and none have returned calls. I also tried to e-mail them - no response.

Kind of hard to shell out $13 - $30 per lead and not have the opportunity to sell my service... Gonna give it a couple of more days, if nothing changes, I'm cancelling my account.

Not bashing them, but find it pretty weird/suspicious that I haven't been able to get in touch with anyone referred by HA.  

That just goes to show all marketing is local. What works in one location could bust somewhere else. The main thing is to try everything and see what sticks.

So after a week and a half with HA here it is... In my opinion they will never be able to produce a reasonable ROI .

Out of nine "leads" and over $100 in lead fees, I was able to make contact with three of the leads. I scheduled two of them for carpet cleaning for a combined total of less than $250. I also scheduled the third one that I was able to contact, but they had to cancel because the "lead" was for air duct repairs (which I don't do) not air duct cleaning.

Out of the other six "leads" one was a wrong number, but using the "white pages" app I was able to find the right number, call and leave a message and sent an e-mail. Another one I tried to call had a mailbox that was full (called several times over two days and sent e-mail). I tried to contact all of these "leads" within two minutes of receiving them. None of them returned my calls or e-mails.

Additionally, I found out that they added this MhelpDesk to my account for an additional fee of $59 per month. When I signed up for the HA acct they led me to believe that this was a necessary part of their program and that it was included in the subscription. Apparently it is some type of contact manager/accounting program. I already have a perfectly good program that I use. It is not necessary and not included in the subscription... I called and they did credit back the $59.

Last Thursday e-mailed them and asked for credit for the six "leads" that did not return my calls. I got a response yesterday that they will credit two of them - the one with the wrong number and the one with the wrong service. That's nice but, I don't know how they can consider the other ones legitimate leads when I as a contractor contact the "lead" immediately and never get a response from them...

I am cancelling the service this week. I think the idea of HA is good, but I don't trust them or their system of lead generation. My close rate on legitimate leads from all sources is better than 95%. But, I consider a legitimate lead someone who is interested enough to make an inquiry and interested enough in having the service done to answer my timely calls in a timely matter. I just can't afford to waist money on the 66% of bad "leads" that are or maybe sent.

I average upwards of an $8 - $1 return on my direct mail and about the same on Google Adwords (actually closer to $10 - $1). I can't see how HA can ever come close to producing returns like that given what I have experienced and all of the similar negative experiences I have read on line.

Hope this helps. If HA is right for you go for it. But I can't recommend it. :thumbs down: :thumbs down:

sorry to hear Joe, maybe it was worth a shot and at least you didnt loose money.

All these programs are different in different areas.

Sounds like a nightmare, Joe. And borderline Bogus leads.

Thanks for the review.

That's in his state though Dave, I think you should try it Dave and let me know if it works in LA or not

Joe, did you pay by credit card for the leads that you got no contact from? Ask for credit on those or work with your CC co. to contest the charges. You know your in the right.
Some cities it works, some it doesn't.

dp1 wrote:That's in his state though Dave, I think you should try it Dave and let me know if it works in LA or not

I'll pass.........

Shady biz practices are prob pretty constant from State to state.

And really, I don't need anymore time wasters than I already get.

From my experience, if a person isn't serious enough to contact you personally, they aren't really that serious, and will likely be just wasting your/my time. And very possibly just looking for the cheapest price, in which I have no interest.

its all different state to state Davey, its possible they are trying to build a presence in Joe's area but dont really have one established.

Seattle is a big city and there are a lot of companies making great money using HA

Matt; My carpet cleaner wrote:Joe, did you pay by credit card for the leads that you got no contact from? Ask for credit on those or work with your CC co. to contest the charges. You know your in the right.
Some cities it works, some it doesn't.

It's worth a shot but if there's contract signed, they might win, unless if he used Amex, Amex is awesome, they're great for consumers, that's one of the reason why I don't take Amex as payment

I'm actually going to do some research for LA market.

Thanks for the review Joe. The fact that they werent willing to crdit your account for the other leads says a lot. I get a lot of biz from Angies and I still don't want to pay to advertise with them

No method works in all regions nor for every cleaner. If it did, there would only be one out there.

I like Joe's approach here, give it a chance and see what happens. If no good, pull the plug and move on.

milspec6 wrote:No method works in all regions nor for every cleaner.  If it did, there would only be one out there.

I like Joe's approach here, give it a chance and see what happens.  If no good, pull the plug and move on.

Yep, you never know unless you try it.
Unless its the shopping carts, or the golf course signs at each hole, or the school sports calanders
There is NO magical advertising program. If there was....

Joe, now go and get referrals from those 2 customers you did work for. And keep in touch with them for repeat biz. That will make it more profitable!

Sorry for another long post.
There is always a cost for new customer acquisition. Even most referrals cost something - ie. time and fuel for estimates possibly a discount or something for the referrer. The key is to minimize the cost to maximize the return.

I like the "idea" of HA especially as a filler to smooth out slower times of the month and year. But in order to minimize the overall cost per new customer (the subscription cost plus the cost of every lead paid for, divided by the actual number of jobs acquired) you don't just need leads - you need "qualified/quality" leads. I am not confident in the overall quality of the leads that they can provide. So I can't see using this service as a good long term option.

With that said... We all have different financial needs with regards to actual revenue and cash flow. If you are going to use a service like HA consider the following. What percentage of the leads they provide are good quality? 10%, 20%, 30%.... Let's say 30% (I think that will be on the high side in most markets). Let's say your monthly spend level is $500 and the average you spend per lead is $15.

Take $500 spent divided by $15 average lead cost = 33 leads.
Take 33 leads times 30% the percent of quality leads = 10.
Take the 10 qualified leads times your avg close rate (let's use 90%) = 9 new customers.
Take the 9 new custys times your avg job (let's use $150) = $1350 total revenue generated.

Your average cost per acquired custy is $$55.56 ($500/9)
Your immediate ROI is 2.7 ($1350/$500) actually a little less because of the subscription cost. Obviously your long term ROI will be determined by how good you are at keeping your custys and getting referrals...

There are not too many businesses that can survive the long haul with an ROI less than 4.

If you can survive on a 2.7, or your avg job is Significantly higher then the example, or you are confident that HA or any service like this will produce a Significantly higher percentage of Quality Leads, then this might be a good service for you to use month in and month out.

Since they take out the fees weekly, it may also prove to be worthwhile to use if you have a slow month or two just to help with cash flow. In fact based on this analysis I may just renew my subscription next Jan and Feb to help with cash flow.

I hope this helps.

Joe, as an English grad from a State University, I can honestly say that I never analyze things as clearly as you just did. I would have tried it for a month and just said that it didn't work for me based on what my account balance looked like at the time.

I should become more analytic with these matters, but I think it would just depress me and cause me to close the doors and go fishing.

I used to count my ROI like that the first 5 years or so, since we were spending close to $ 30 k for the year in advertisements.
Those days are over thank God, because we have not tried any new advertisements in a few years, and in my experience, any advertising in the winter always resulted in poor ROI, even google adwords and yelp which works really well in the summer, there's something about winter that makes people extra cheap and have to make other people's life miserable

You can thank that fat guy in the red suit for that Dp.