1. How many signed jobs did this vendor actually produce?
Not leads, not appointments: signed contracts, traced back to leads that came from this vendor. If you can't answer this, that's the first thing to fix. Every other question depends on it.
2. What did each of those jobs cost?
Add up everything you paid the vendor over the period, including subscription fees, per-lead charges and any add-ons, and divide by the signed jobs. Then do the same for your other paid channels. Why this beats cost per lead.
3. Is the difference big enough to trust?
If the vendor produced 3 jobs and another channel produced 5, the gap might be luck. Look at how many leads each figure rests on, and whether your conclusion would still hold if the vendor's true signing rate were a bit higher than it looked. How to check.
4. Where do this vendor's leads fall out?
Compare each step, from inquiry to consultation to proposal to signed contract, against your other channels. If leads rarely book consultations, check lead fit, response time and booking practices before deciding where the problem lies. If they book but rarely sign, look at price expectations, project fit and how proposals are followed up. The pattern tells you where to look, not who is to blame, so check your own process before you cut or renegotiate.
5. What would you do with the money instead?
Cutting a channel only helps if the budget goes somewhere better. Look at which channels produce signed jobs at the lowest cost, and whether they could take more spend. Referrals and repeat clients often produce the cheapest jobs of all, but they can't always be scaled by spending more.
A quick rule of thumb
If a vendor's cost per signed job is several times your other paid channels, and that holds up when you give it the benefit of the doubt, it deserves a hard look before renewal. In our case study, that gap was 5.6×, and the owner dropped the channel.
Don't have time to work through this?
That's what the Channel Decision Audit is for. Send us your exports, and within 2 weeks you'll have a one-page answer on whether to renew, with the numbers behind it and how confident we are. Fixed price, independent, and no stake in which channels you keep.