How sponsors are chosen

Some planning application pages on PlanningLeads carry a message from a supplier who has paid for it. This page explains when that happens, what decides which supplier you see, and what we do and do not share.

When a sponsored message appears

A sponsor pays to appear beside applications for the kind of work its products are used in, in the council areas it chooses. Which applications a product category covers is decided by fixed rules about the work itself: a description that names landscaping, for example, or a new house, which will need windows, a roof and heating. The same rules apply to every application, and we check them against the registers before a category is offered. Applications that were refused or withdrawn, or that only keep work already built, carry no sponsored message. If an application matches a sponsored category in a sponsored area, a message may appear below the planning record. It is never part of the record, and it never changes what the record says.

Which sponsor you see

A council area is a planning authority, so Dublin is four areas and Cork and Galway are two each. Each category in each area has a limit on how many sponsors it takes, set by how many applications it matched in the last year: a busy area takes more than a quiet one. An application often matches several categories. They are ranked the same way on every page: work the description names comes first, the most specific first, then work the project implies, in the order its products are usually bought. The three best-ranked categories that have a sponsor in the area share the message space, half, three tenths and a fifth of page views in that order. Within a category, the sponsor you see is picked at random each time the page loads, with the same chance for each, and so is the message when a sponsor has more than one. A signed-in lead page can show two different sponsors at once, chosen the same way. Nothing about you, the applicant or the address decides it. A sponsor keeps its place in the order it joined, even if demand in its area later falls. When an area is full, new sponsors wait in the order they asked.

How it is labelled

Every sponsored message says Sponsored, names the company that paid for it, and says why it is shown, for example: shown because heat pumps and ventilation, for new houses in Kerry. Its link is marked as paid for search engines. A sponsor is not affiliated with the applicant or the council, and appearing beside an application is not a recommendation for that job.

What sponsors never receive

No applicant's name, address or contact details, and nothing about who read the page. The request that fetches a message carries only product categories and the council area, never the application. Sponsors may not use PlanningLeads to contact applicants.

What is counted

We count a view when at least half of a message is on screen for a second, and a click when someone follows its link. Each count holds the message, the product category, the council area and its county, the kind of page and the day, with no cookie, no account and no address. Search engine crawlers are not counted. Sponsors see these totals by area.

What a sponsor may say

A message has a short headline, one line of text and a link to the sponsor's own site. We do not accept general environmental claims without recognised proof, or claims of SEAI approval.

Reporting a sponsored message

Every message has a Report link. Tell us what is wrong and, if you want a reply, how to reach you. We review every report; if we uphold it, the message comes down.

Who sponsors today

The first sponsor is PlantGift, a supplier of ground cover, hedging and landscaping plants, which is owned by the founder of PlanningLeads. It is labelled and chosen exactly as any other sponsor would be.

Suppliers who want to sponsor can read about the scheme on the advertise page. How a tradesperson's job feed is ordered, which no one can pay to change, is on how ranking works.