Pay for the enquiry, not the experiment.
Run Digital runs pay per lead for Utah businesses where it genuinely fits, and says so when it does not. The campaigns, the tracking and the leads themselves belong to you, and we would rather work out on the call whether the numbers support it than find out together in month six.
Three things we will put in writing.
Every agency says they are different. These are the three we will be held to, on every engagement, from the first month.
The accountability factor
A standing meeting cadence, real project management, and deliverables with dates on them. You always know what shipped, what is in flight and what slipped.
You decide if we earn our seat at your table every month. There is no contract asking you not to.
A customized solution
Not a fixed price per lead pulled from a rate card. What a lead is worth in your business, at your margin and your close rate, decides what the arrangement can look like.
Ask for something specific and the answer is usually yes, built for you rather than pulled off a shelf.
Actual technicality
Not a sales rep, then a success manager, then an account manager relaying your question to someone who can answer it.
You talk to the people running the campaigns.
Pay per lead is not automatically safer.
The appeal is obvious. You only pay when something arrives, so the risk appears to move to the agency. That is true of the media risk and it is not true of the rest.
What actually decides whether this works is lead quality, exclusivity and your own response time. A shared lead sold to four companies is not worth a quarter as much as an exclusive one, it is worth far less, because now you are in a race you did not know you entered. And a lead you answer on Tuesday was not really bought at all.
So we will do the arithmetic with you first. If the price you would have to pay is above what a lead is worth at your margin, we will tell you that instead of selling you the arrangement anyway.
Pay per lead that works
- Exclusive leads, sold to you and nobody else
- A definition of a qualified lead agreed in writing
- A way to reject a lead that clearly does not meet it
- Response inside minutes, because you pay either way
- Tracking that proves where each one came from
- A price derived from your margin, not a rate card
Pay per lead that quietly loses money
- The same lead sold to three competitors
- "Lead" defined as anyone who filled in anything
- No rejection process, so you pay for wrong numbers
- Leads sitting unanswered for a day
- No way to verify the source of anything
- A flat price per lead with no relationship to your economics
The ceiling, before you agree to anything.
This is the arithmetic any pay per lead conversation should start with, and almost none of them do. It takes about thirty seconds and it is the difference between a good arrangement and an expensive year.
What can you actually afford to pay for a lead?
Almost nobody works this out before buying leads, which is why so many businesses discover the answer the expensive way. It is three numbers and one division.
Your numbers.
Gross profit, not revenue, is the number that matters here and it is the one people substitute by accident. If you use revenue you will calculate a ceiling you cannot actually afford, which is the most common way a pay per lead arrangement quietly loses money for a year.
The leads are yours. So is everything that produced them.
Pay per lead arrangements are where ownership gets murkiest, because the agency has an obvious incentive to keep the machine in their own name. If the campaigns, the landing pages and the phone numbers all belong to them, you are not buying leads. You are renting access to a tap they can close.
That is also what makes the pricing conversation impossible. You cannot negotiate from a position where leaving means starting from nothing.
We build in accounts registered to your business even when the commercial arrangement is per lead. Fire us on a Friday and the campaigns are still yours on Monday, which is exactly why we have to be worth keeping.
In your name, from day one
- Every lead and their full contact details
- The ad accounts and campaign history
- Landing pages on your own domain
- Tracking numbers registered to your business
- The CRM those leads land in
- Conversion data in your own analytics
What you find out you were renting
- Leads passed to you but held in their system
- Campaigns inside the agency's ad account
- Landing pages on a domain they control
- A tracking number that stops working when you leave
- A CRM seat rather than a CRM
- Attribution you have to take on trust
Do you want to manage five marketers?
Generating leads reliably is media buying, creative, landing pages, tracking and somebody senior watching quality rather than volume. Hire that in-house and you are recruiting five specialists before the first lead arrives.
We built our careers inside in-house teams before we built this one. Brian has twenty years in agencies. Quinn came up in-house at large publishers. That is the team you are renting time on, without the hiring risk or the learning curve.
Building it in-house
Five hires- Recruiting, onboarding and managing every one of them
- Salaries, benefits, payroll tax and software seats
- Fixed cost whether the leads arrive or not
- The learning curve, paid for in wasted media spend
- Volume targets that quietly become quality problems
Run as your team
One monthly fee- Media, creative, pages and tracking covered from day one
- Pricing tied to results rather than headcount
- Thirty years of combined experience on the account
- No contract, no notice period, no hiring risk
- Everything built stays in accounts you own
Two of the five seats you would otherwise be recruiting for.
A small market where lead quality moves fast.
Utah is a compact, well networked market. That makes exclusivity worth more here than it would be in a big metro, because the same shared lead is genuinely being called by somebody you know. Every figure below is published and linked.
of Utah businesses are small businesses, 371,569 of them. In a market this concentrated, a shared lead has usually already been called.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025population growth over the past decade against 6.2% nationally, second fastest of any state. Genuine new demand, which is what makes this viable at all.
USAFacts, US Census dataof Utah employees work at a small business, about 690,069 people. Most of those businesses answer their own phones between jobs.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025businesses competing for the same enquiries. Speed of response is the cheapest advantage available to any of them.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025Which is why we care so much about what happens after the lead arrives. In a market this size, buying leads into a slow follow-up process is the most expensive mistake available.
Eight disciplines of performance-based lead generation.
This is the list you would be hiring five people to cover.
Lead qualification and scoring
A written definition of what counts as a lead, agreed before anything runs. Nearly every dispute in this model traces back to not having one.
Exclusive, multi-channel lead generation
Leads generated for you, not sold to a list. Exclusivity is the difference between a lead and a race.
Landing pages
On your domain, built for the specific campaign, because the page decides more of the cost per lead than the bidding does.
Instant response and CRM integration
An automatic first reply in seconds, because a lead you paid for and did not answer is the worst possible outcome.
Call tracking and recording
Proof of where every lead came from and what happened when you spoke to them, which is also how quality gets improved.
Rejection and credit process
A clear way to flag a lead that did not meet the definition, handled without an argument.
Volume control and pipeline fit
Pacing matched to what your team can actually answer, rather than to what the budget could buy.
Quality and conversion reporting
Close rates by source and campaign, so the conversation is about quality rather than about counting.
What a lead is actually worth.
Every pay per lead arrangement lives or dies on one number that most businesses have never calculated.
Things we give away.
We would rather be useful before you hire us than persuasive. Take any of these whether or not we ever work together.
Lead economics review
We work out your ceiling with you and tell you whether pay per lead is viable in your category. Yours to keep either way.
FreeFollow-up templates
The instant response and follow-up sequences we use, so leads do not go cold whoever generated them.
FreeTap to review cards and stands
Physical NFC cards and counter stands that send customers straight to your review page. We print them and send them to you.
FreeWebsite migrations
Stuck on a platform you do not own? We will move the site for free. Getting you onto your own infrastructure is the point.
How the arrangement gets set up.
Most of the work in pay per lead happens before any leads are generated. This is the order.
Do the arithmetic together
Your margin, your close rate, your ceiling. If the numbers do not support it we say so here and neither of us wastes a quarter finding out.
Written down, yours to keepDefine a qualified lead
In writing, with the rejection process agreed at the same time. This single document prevents almost every argument this model is known for.
Agreed before anything runsBuild it in your accounts
Ad accounts, landing pages, tracking numbers and CRM, all registered to your business even though we are running them.
Yours from day oneFix the response before the volume
Instant reply and routing live before we open the tap, because paying for a lead and answering it on Thursday is worse than not buying it.
Scale on quality, not count
Volume increases only where close rates hold. A month with fewer better leads is a better month and we will report it that way.
The findings get written down. You keep them either way.
Thirty-five clients. Four years. One roof.
Those are counts, not projections. We have not printed a cost per lead on this page because a number without your category, your geography and your margin attached to it would be meaningless and mildly dishonest. The calculator above uses your numbers.
If you want to see real lead quality reporting, ask on the call and we will pull an actual one rather than a designed graphic.
Salt Lake, Utah County, and the rest of the Wasatch Front.
We do this for businesses in Salt Lake City, Provo, Orem, Lehi, Ogden, West Jordan, St. George and across the state. Utah is small enough that lead quality varies enormously by city, and a campaign that works in Salt Lake can be uneconomic in Utah County at the same price.
If the honest answer is that your category does not support paid lead generation, we will say so on the call and talk about what would.
A lead is only worth what happens next.
This model puts all the pressure on the part after the enquiry arrives, which is exactly where most businesses are weakest.
AI automation
Takes the repetitive work off your team without taking the judgement away.
SEO
Earns the clicks you would otherwise rent, and keeps earning them after the budget stops.
Websites
The page everything else sends traffic to. If it does not convert, nothing upstream matters.
Web analytics
Tells you which half of the budget is working, with tracking you can actually trust.
Pay per lead questions we get every week.
Yes. We do not sell the same lead to more than one client, and we would treat doing so as fraud rather than as a business model. If you are talking to anyone else about this, that is the first question to ask them.
Whatever we agree in writing before anything runs, based on your category. Every dispute this model is famous for traces back to nobody defining it. There is also an agreed way to reject one that clearly does not meet the definition.
It depends entirely on your category and your margin, which is why the calculator above comes before any price. If your ceiling is below what leads cost to generate in your market, pay per lead is the wrong model for you and we will say so.
You do, even though the pricing is per lead. The ad accounts, the landing pages and the tracking numbers are all in your name. That means you can leave, which is the only thing that keeps the arrangement honest.
Then we pace it down. Buying more leads than you can answer is the fastest way to lose money in this model, and we would rather deliver fewer that convert than hit a number.
Minutes, not hours. You are paying for every lead whether or not you speak to it, so response time translates directly into money here in a way it does not elsewhere. We build the instant response before we open the tap.
Sometimes. It is better when your economics are well understood and your follow-up is genuinely fast. It is worse when you are still working out your offer, because the model rewards volume and punishes experimentation. We will tell you which situation you are in.
There is no contract, so you leave whenever you want and keep the campaigns, the pages and every lead already generated. If the arithmetic stops working we would rather move you to a different model than keep selling you leads you cannot afford.
Start by working out your ceiling.
Bring your margin and your close rate to the call and we will work out together what a lead is worth to you and whether this model fits. If it does not, we will tell you what would. Prices are published, so you can see what this costs before you speak to anyone.