Experience with Thumbtack Leads

[Mike Wilton]

I've noticed an uptick in the number of leads some of our doctors are getting from Thumbtack.com, a site we use regularly as a citation source. However, the cost to submit a quote for the procedure is $5.99.

Have any of you followed up with leads through Thumbtack, and what was your experience like? I just want to make sure that its worth the money to even reach out to these people, or are most of these bogus or low quality leads.

 

[Phil Rozek]

Good call, Mike. I can?t say I've got any experience with Thumbtack leads. (Like you, I?ve just used it as a citation source and obviously as a place to stick lots of photos.) Thumbtack results seem to rank pretty well organically, from what I?ve seen, so I think there?s probably potential there. But I?d be really interested in hearing what you or someone else finds regarding the paid leads. At $6 a pop, I would think you could do a pretty quick micro-test and just see how many wallets open up.

 

[Marie Ysais]

I have seen the same increase in leads from Thumbtack but I have not tested or tried it out! I was also curious!

 

[Mike Wilton]

So it sounds like most of us local folks are all in the same boat at the moment. I am going to talk to my team today about it and see if we can parter with a client on any new leads that come in and see what we can do. I'll let you all know how it pans out! Thanks for the feedback.

 

[Linda Buquet]

No feedback for you Mike, but just tweeted to see if we can get you some.

 

[localdude]

I've gotten some leads but have been very wary after reading these negative things about thumbtack.com

some say it's a scam as it seems they generate fake leads to buy:

Thumbtack for Small Business Leads - Boom, Bust or Scam?

Thumbtack - Lower Haight - San Francisco, CA

 

[Dave]

We have some experience. Thumbtack came to mind today as one of our smb's received a request for a price quote...but there was a charge attached to it; something we hadn't experienced before.

Here is the history;

About 3 years ago I was reading about thumbtack and ended up putting a link to thumbtack on our site at the very bottom of a long page. It was quite obscure.

I simultaneously searched for visibility for the smb in question via a thumbtack link. The search visibility was very poor. Regardless over the 3 years the smb site has averaged about 1 lead/month from Thumbtack. Possibly b/c we had the link on our site we never saw charges for the leads till the other day.

Meanwhile over that 3 year period the smb received thousands of leads. Lead volume is somewhere in the hundreds/month. Needless to say thumbtack was a very minor contributor to leads.

Over the couple of years I couldn't figure out how searchers came to us via thumbtack. Visibility is simply minimal and miserable. Finally after actually getting follow up w/ some of the leads I was able to ask some questions and the link off of our website was referenced.

Son of a gun. At least some of the leads were off our own site. I had completely forgotten about the reference and had to search the site to find it.

We haven't seen a lead via thumbtack since this past June and one in Sept was the first requesting a payment.

Scr#%*^w that. I'm not paying thumbtack for leads that quite possibly come off our own site.

On the other hand, the intriguing emails/forms/ responses to people who clicked on the link and requested "price bids" obviously has worked at some levels. These were off of pages with highly visible contact forms. On the OTHER OTHER Hand the contact forms generated leads at a rate of something in excess of 100+ to every one thumbtack lead.

Lesson: the thumbtack email/form to a user offering a "price bid" is somewhat effective. I'm going to offer something like that on the site(s) to see how they work.

Thumbtack does offer leads. Are they valuable? You'll have to figure that out. Besides offering leads it forces the leads to compete with other vendors. That automatically discounts their effectiveness, especially if you are losing on price or other qualities.

Finally per Greg Sterling thumbtack recently raised very very big bucks through a VC fund raising effort as of late August: Under the Radar, Thumbtack Grabs Surprising $100M Series D Round

If they use that money wisely they may boost their site's visibility considerably. I guess we'll all see in the future.

 

[Blake Denman]

A friend of mine owns a pest control company and gave Thumbtack an honest shot for nearly 2 months. We all know that pest control is highly competitive. He was receiving 15-25 leads per day for pest control related quotes. After quoting for nearly 2 months he landed 1 job. Given that he received one job from it, financially it made sense. But if you account for all the time he spent trying to get new clients via the leads Thumbtack was providing it was nothing but a time suck.

 

[Dave]

A friend of mine owns a pest control company and gave Thumbtack an honest shot for nearly 2 months. We all know that pest control is highly competitive. He was receiving 15-25 leads per day for pest control related quotes. After quoting for nearly 2 months he landed 1 job. Given that he received one job from it, financially it made sense. But if you account for all the time he spent trying to get new clients via the leads Thumbtack was providing it was nothing but a time suck.

That is very interesting and entirely different from what our smb's and vertical experienced. I searched for pest control in and around my region. thumbtack has pretty high search visibility in google. OTOH it has no visibility in two of our vertical types.

With the infusion of $100 million from VC's it could try and replicate what yelp has done with powerful serps. That would make it meaningful.

In our vertical paying them for leads would essentially be paying them for skimming our traffic off our website.

Different strokes for different folks.

 

[DFoertsch]

This thread jogged my memory, listened to an interview a while back w/ Thumbtack's founder.
I've bid on a handful of Thumbtack projects myself, but wasn't thrilled with the lack of response from the companies that were looking for help. If I'm spending money (albeit a nominal amount) to bid it would be helpful if there was some type of feedback on the bids, even if not selected. Especially since almost every bid requires some questions/clarification on project scope.

So I guess it's a work-in-progress.