Is Bark.com worth the money?
Let’s start with how Bark.com works. In simple terms they sell leads for a variety of services to multiple businesses. Supposedly one lead is only sold to 5 businesses to follow up.
But the devil is in the detail. These leads are acquired via the Bark.com website and the potential leads filling in a set of questions to establish what it is they are after. The idea behind these questions is to give the business buying the lead a better idea of what they are buying. Also, it allows Bark to charge more for leads that are potentially bigger projects.
How do they charge?
They use credits which businesses buy on the Bark.com website. These credits, at time of writing, start from £1.20 per credit. Depending on which sector you are in the leads can cost from 5 credits i.e. 5 x £1.20 = £6, up to a very large number of 50+ credits meanings 50 x £1.20 = £60. The more credits you buy the cheaper they become, and they do send out email offers for discounted credits.
Do these leads know anything about you?
Typically no, the potential leads populate the Bark.com questionnaire about the service they want, then wait to be contacted by whichever 5 businesses, who subscribe to Bark.com, choose to pay for the leads. So these leads are not quite cold, as they do want information about your sector, but they are very close to being cold, and you’ll need to sell your company and service via email, SMS or phone if buy the contact details.
How do you stand out from the other Bark.com businesses?
In typical capitalist fashion, by paying more and becoming an Elite Pro. This gives you an early chance to contact leads and if they happen to stumble on your business on the bark.com directory it shows you as an Elite Pro. Another way to stand out is by getting hired via Bark.com as it shows how many times you’ve been appointed. Last way to stand out is by being first to call/email/SMS the lead on the early bird catches the worm principle.
If you really want to stand out from the crowd then why not try running your own Google Ad campaign and get leads directly from your website without having to buy from Bark or fight with other people also buying from Bark. Google are running a promotion where they give people new to Google Ads up to £450 towards the click costs. Just ping us an email if you’d like to have a chat about how this works- chris.p@frontpageadvantage.com.
How do Bark.com get the details from the leads?
Google Ads but likely also Facebook and other marketing avenues. For a wide range of services they ask potential leads a number of questions in a structured way that they then sell to businesses registered on Bark.com.
Is it better to use Bark.com or run my own Google Ads?
To answer this question we need to look at the costs behind both of these. I’ll do my best to give close to a real life example of click and credit prices plus explain a bit about how Google Ads works.
Let’s use a potential customer looking for a new fence and assume we are a “fence contractor”.
First off, Google Ads works on an auction principle so you set your bid prices for each keyword then Google will spend your money (in simple terms). So let’s use the keyword search term “new fence contractor” which costs approximately £1.10 to be top of Google and is the price you pay for every click to your website.
Let’s assume you as the Fence Company are willing to paying £1.10 per click but Bark.com will be willing to pay more, which is very likely based on the math’s we will show below. So Bark.com will pay £1.20 per click. See below, at time of writing they are top for this specific paid search term.
Let’s assume monthly Searches in Google for “New Fence Contractor” are approximately 100.
If you as the fencing company would run your own Google Ad campaign and get 10% of the people searching to click on your Google Ad, this will give you 10 people at a cost of £11 (10 x £1.10). Hopefully 10% of those people then enquire about your service meaning 1 enquiry (10 x 10%) at a cost of £11. This person has been on your website, seen your reviews, knows your services, know your location and have decided to contact you. i.e. a very warm lead.
Compare this to Bark.com. From the fencing companies perspective, you will see some answers like the below from which you need to decide whether to buy the contact details. In the below, the cost is 11 credits which is £13.20 to get the contact details. However, at least five other businesses will also be contacting this person. AND the person in question knows nothing about any of the five people calling them, no reviews, no idea of service, no idea of location etc. so it’s up to you as the Fencing company to use email, SMS or phone to sell your services in a very similar way as a cold lead. If you don’t have people that are good at selling via the phone then its unlikely Bark.com will work for you. Also, consider that lots of fence companies will get the details at the same time so the person will likely receive lots of calls in a short space of time and one bad call will tarnish the rest. Not easy.
Based on all the above the comparison is 1) running your own Google Ad campaign paying approx. £11 for a warm informed lead or 2) using Bark.com paying £13 for a coldish lead. Now, obviously I’ve used assumptions (which are close to reality) and if your Google Ads campaign only converts 5% of the clicks to enquiries, your cost goes up to £22 (£11/0.5). Thus, would you prefer £22 for a warm informed lead or £13 for a coldish lead. Also consider, that you don’t know the size of the job coming from your own Google Ad campaign, as it could be a single fence panel repair or a new fence for Buckingham Palace.
Follow this link to see how much it costs to have a Google Ads account set up and managed by us.
Is Bark.com worth it if I don’t use Google Ads?
We can take the same math’s from above in that each lead will cost you £13.20 from bark.com. (this will fluctuate based on smaller/larger jobs) and if you have no other marketing efforts then it might seem cheap. The proof will be in the pudding, in terms of how many contact details you have to buy before you land a job. You won’t know this until you start buying details, but I’d suggest if you’ve bought 10 leads and none of them have converted, costing you £132 (£13.20 x 10) then Bark.com is unlikely to work for you.
Why not consider spending that £132 on optimizing your own website for local customers near to you with some SEO, for which you won’t pay for contact details when they click through and will be contacted by people who found you, not the other way round.
So who does Bark.com work for?
I see two scenarios where Bark.com can work.
- If you have no website, a poor website or no money for marketing your website, and have no leads coming in at all, then Bark.com will at least give you leads to pitch for work even if they aren’t good leads.
- If you are in a highly competitive market and are priced out of Google Ads due to the high click prices, then Bark.com can contribute to part of your lead generation activity but again, proof is in the pudding. If you’ve bought ten and got nothing back, then the answer for you is no it won’t work. It will be down to the people on the phones skill in converting sales.
What are the other lead generation methods?
Bark.com are tapping into clients that use Google to find services which is a huge market and works well for them as they just need to make sure their credit prices are set at more than 5 times the cost of the clicks for each service. But there are other ways you can tap into the same market. Search Engine Optimisation makes sure your website appears high in the search results, just under the paid Google Ads (like Bark.com’s). Also, for products that are very location specific you can create and optimize your own Google My Business listing which is the map section of the Google results. Furthermore, you can create your own Google Ad campaign and focus on search terms that are at a price that suits your marketing budget.
How do Bark.com make money?
Funny you should ask, but we’ve done some more math. Effectively their business is all about managing click prices versus credits and credit prices. Let’s use our above example to show what Bark.com are making.
Monthly Searches 100
Clicks to their website 10% 10
Filling in forms 10% 1
Click Cost to get this one enquiry (£1.20 x 10) £12 This is their business COST
With this one enquiry they sell to minimum 5 businesses
Cost to each Business 11 credits x £1.20 £13.20
Total income from selling one lead £66
Profit (£66-£13.20) £52.80
Profit % (52.80/66) 80%
The beauty of their business model is they can turn on/off all the Google Clicks and simultaneously increase/decrease the amounts of credits for a lead and the cost for each of the credits. They also get paid regardless whether the lead you buy generates business for anyone. A very profitable business model at the expense of what would be businesses who pay Google directly for ads. One has to wonder how much longer Google will allow this company, and a like, to profit from what is effectively Googles own business customers.
I’ll let you do the math if they sell one lead to more than 5 customers, but printing money comes to mind.
I hope this was a useful insight into Bark.com and if you’d like to chat about alternatives such as your own Google Ad campaign or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for some free traffic then please give us a call to chat through your options.