What you paid in advertising to produce one enquiry — a form, a call or a message — before anybody has bought anything.
Cost per lead is the first number most business owners are quoted, and the easiest to make look good. A campaign can drive the figure down by attracting enquiries that never had any intention of buying, and the report will look better while the business does worse.
It is genuinely useful when read next to close rate. Forty-dollar leads that close at one in twenty are worse than two-hundred-dollar leads that close at one in three.
| Campaign A | Campaign B | |
| Cost per lead | $40 | $200 |
| Leads per month | 50 | 10 |
| Close rate | 5% | 33% |
| Customers | 2.5 | 3.3 |
| Cost per customer | $800 | $606 |
Campaign A looks five times more efficient and produces fewer customers at a higher cost.
There is a free calculator on this site for exactly this.
A free consult is twenty minutes and there is no pitch deck at the end of it.