How pay-per-result marketing works for local service businesses

Pay-per-result marketing means the company that builds and runs your marketing gets paid only when it produces real, paid work for your business. Done properly, it puts most of the risk on the marketing partner instead of on you.

• You pay nothing upfront and no monthly retainer.
• A result counts only when all three are true: the customer came through the partner, the job was completed, and you were paid.
• Clicks, leads, calls and bookings are not results on their own.
• Customers you already had are not charged.
• Refunded or charged-back work earns no fee.
• The territory you get exclusively is agreed in writing when you sign.

The rest of this guide explains each of those rules, shows how they play out in real situations, and ends with the questions to ask any provider — including us.

Most owners have paid for marketing in at least one of these ways. The difference that matters most is not the price tag — it is who carries the risk when the marketing doesn't produce work.

None of these is wrong for every business. A retainer can make sense when you want a large amount of agency time regardless of outcome. Ads can make sense for a short burst of demand. Pay-per-result makes the most sense when you have the capacity for more work and would rather pay from revenue than from your marketing budget.

A result needs all three of these. Missing any one, there is no fee.

1. It came through Jadeed. The customer first reached you through the marketing we built and run — a tracked call, form, message or booking from the channels in your agreement.
2. The work was completed. The job was actually done, not just quoted or booked.
3. You were paid. The customer paid you. Our fee is worked out on paid work only.

That rules out the things many marketing reports count as wins: a click, an impression, a lead or form, a phone call, a booking on its own. They are useful signals — a busy phone is better than a quiet one — but a booking can cancel, a quote can lose and an invoice can go unpaid. Paying on completed, paid work is the only way the fee tracks what your business actually earned.

Attribution answers one question: did this customer come through the marketing the partner built and runs? With us, a customer is attributable when their first contact comes through a Jadeed-controlled channel — a tracked phone number, the website forms, the Business Profile we manage, or a campaign we run — and the job is completed and paid within 90 days of that first contact.

Ninety days is a working default, not a law of nature. A furniture commission or a system replacement can take longer to decide, so industries with longer sales cycles can agree a different window in the written agreement.

Here is how the rules play out:

Repeat work. Repeat work from a customer we introduced can count for 12 months from their first paid job, while the partnership is active. After that, they are simply your customer. A defined period is fairer than the “every future purchase, forever” rules some arrangements use — you should not pay a marketing partner indefinitely for a customer you are now keeping through your own good work.

Refunds and chargebacks. If a customer's payment is refunded, reversed or charged back, there is no fee on revenue you did not keep. If our fee was already paid, we credit it against the next settlement.

Existing customers. Customers you already had are not charged. Someone who finds your new website but already does business with you is your customer, not ours. The one exception is a reactivation campaign we run for you: if a past customer with no paid job in about 12 months comes back through a Jadeed-controlled campaign that we can track, that job can count.

You know your business better than anyone, so day-to-day reporting runs on trust: you tell us what happened with the customers we send. In return, we ask for the access and cooperation the digital side needs — the website, tracking and profiles we run for you — and we always explain why we need it.

Each customer moves through the same five stages, visible to both sides:

When you report a paid job manually, five details are enough:

• Customer or reference ID
• Service or job
• Job value
• Completion date
• Payment status and date

If an entry is ever in question, we may ask for an invoice reference, a payment-processor confirmation or a redacted document for that one job. We never ask for bank statements as routine, and we never publish your customers' invoices.

A pay-per-result partner is only worth as much as its focus. If it also works for the business down the road, every improvement it makes for you, it can make for them. That's why territory matters.

During an active exclusive partnership, we generally don't work with a competing business in the same agreed territory. The territory is defined in writing when we sign — not every city is automatically exclusive. A territory can be:

• A service radius around your base
• A cluster of ZIP codes
• A city boundary, where that matches how you work

Exclusivity works because the system can run. If tracking or agreed access keeps getting switched off, or outcomes stop being reported, we raise it with you first and agree a reasonable time to sort it out. Only if it continues might campaigns or exclusivity pause, as the agreement sets out.

The fairest comparison is cost per paid job: what you spend on a channel in a month, divided by the paid jobs it actually produced. Put in your own figures below — nothing here predicts how many jobs you will get.

It is not for everyone, and a good provider will tell you so. It tends not to work when:

• You can't take on more work, or can't answer new enquiries quickly.
• Your margins are too thin to share — as a rough guide, if a job leaves less than about $20 after costs, a fee on it rarely works for either side.
• You can't, or would rather not, keep tracking in place and mark what happened with each customer.
• You need results next week. Search visibility compounds over months.
• You are in a regulated profession — law, healthcare, mortgage or real-estate settlement services — where fee-sharing and referral rules vary by profession and state. Those arrangements need legal review first; see our pricing page for how we handle them.

Use these with anyone offering performance-based marketing. A clear, written answer to each is a good sign.

For standard local-service work, our fee is 10% of the full customer invoice once it is paid. High-value or cost-heavy work can use a lower percentage or a flat rate by service type, agreed in writing and reviewed at most once every 12 months. The partnership starts with a 6-month initial term, then runs month to month with 30 days' written notice. Your domain, website and accounts stay in your name.

The full rules are on how it works and pricing. If you want to know whether your business and territory are a fit, start with a free audit.