The complaints that were upheld
In 2023 the US Federal Trade Commission finalised an order against HomeAdvisor, a company affiliated with Angi, requiring it to pay up to $7.2 million over how it marketed leads to service providers. The FTC found the company had made false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold, going back to at least 2014.
Two of the specific findings matter to anyone buying leads: that providers were told they would only receive leads matching the services they offer and the areas they cover, and often did not; and that the company told providers its leads converted into jobs at rates it could not substantiate.
So the instinct that something was wrong was, in that case, correct — and formally established rather than a matter of opinion.
What that does not settle
A finding against one platform in one period does not make every disappointing lead a defective one. And it says nothing about whether the lead you are annoyed about today was bad.
The uncomfortable part is that the two causes produce identical symptoms. A lead that never replies looks the same whether the contact details were junk or whether you answered nine hours later, by which point somebody else had the job.
How to tell them apart
Sort by your own response time first, not by outcome. Take every lead you replied to within, say, fifteen minutes, and look only at those. That set removes your own contribution from the picture.
If a large share of the fast-answered ones still go nowhere — wrong numbers, services you do not offer, addresses outside your area, people who deny requesting anything — that is a lead-quality problem, and it is worth raising with the platform and documenting.
If the fast-answered ones convert acceptably and your overall numbers are poor, the leads were fine. The gap is in how many you managed to answer quickly, which is a capacity problem, not a supplier problem.
Why this is worth the effort
Because the two problems have opposite solutions. A genuine quality problem is solved by changing platform, tightening category and radius settings, or disputing charges. A response problem is not solved by any of those, and switching platforms in that case simply moves the same result somewhere else at a new price.
Most contractors never separate the two, conclude that all lead platforms are the same, and are half right.
Where the numbers come from
- FTC Approves Final Order against HomeAdvisor, Inc. for Deceptively Marketing its Leads for Home Improvement Projects (April 2023)Final consent order following the FTC administrative complaint of March 2022. Concerns HomeAdvisor specifically, over conduct the FTC dates to at least mid-2014 — it is not a finding about lead marketplaces in general, and not about any other platform.