Should I pay an agency per lead instead of a monthly fee?

The appeal of paying per lead is obvious: you only pay for results. The catch is the definition of a result. If a lead is any form submission, the cheapest way for a supplier to deliver is broad targeting, prefilled forms and no qualifying questions, which produces many submissions and few customers. You end up paying for the agency's efficiency at generating forms, not for patients, students or buyers.

Some pay-per-lead arrangements also hide where the leads come from. The supplier may run its own ad accounts, reuse the same leads for several businesses, or mix in leads from other sources. Unless you can see the ad account, the ads and the raw lead data, you cannot know whether each lead is genuinely yours and genuinely new.

If you do want a performance element, define the lead strictly and in writing. For example: a person in Islamabad or Rawalpindi, reachable on the number given, interested in the specific service advertised, and not a duplicate within the last ninety days. Agree how disputes are settled. Better still, link payment to an outcome you can verify yourself, such as booked appointments.

Our own arrangement is the plain one: the Pro package is a monthly fee for running the campaigns, the ad spend is charged by the platform to your card, the accounts are yours, and every lead lands in a sheet you can see. That makes it easy for you to judge whether the work is worth keeping, which is the point.