A low cost per lead is easy to produce. Count more things as leads and the number falls. Nothing about the business improves, and the report looks better every month.
Three things that quietly inflate a lead count
- The same person, twice. Somebody fills in the form and then calls twenty minutes later because they are impatient. That is one customer and two “leads”.
- Page views dressed as conversions. A thank-you page can be counted as a conversion by more than one tag at once, so one submission is reported two or three times.
- Clicks that never connected. A tap on a phone number is a click, not a conversation. Counting it as a lead makes mobile campaigns look far better than they are.
We have seen lead counts fall by roughly a third the first time they are properly deduplicated by name and phone number. Nothing changed in the business; the reporting was simply counting the same people repeatedly.
The one comparison that traps everyone
If you clean up how leads are counted, every earlier month is now measured on a different basis. Comparing this month's clean number to last month's inflated one will look like a collapse. Recount the history on the new definition before you draw any conclusion — and before you change your bids.
Cost per lead is not cost per customer
A $12 lead that books one time in twenty costs $240 per customer. A $40 lead that books one time in three costs $120. The cheaper lead is twice as expensive. This is the entire reason cost per lead cannot be judged on its own, and why a channel that looks expensive in the report is often the profitable one.
Search leads usually cost more and book better. Social leads usually cost less and book worse. Ranking channels by cost per lead alone will reliably push you toward the wrong one.
Your CRM does not know what you were paid
The value recorded against a deal in a CRM is whatever was typed in when it was created. It is not the invoice. On one account we reconciled, the CRM under-recorded revenue by about a fifth, and almost all of the gap was returning customers who never went through the lead pipeline at all.
The only trustworthy revenue number comes from the system that takes the money. Our analytics app exists to put both in one place. If you want to know what marketing produced, the CRM has to be reconciled against the shop system, not trusted on its own.
How to actually connect a lead to a job
The practical join is the phone number. Match the last ten digits of the number on the lead against the number on the paid job. It is unglamorous and it works — on the accounts where we have done this, the overwhelming majority of paying customers match back to a lead record.
Once that join exists you can finally answer the only question that matters: of the money spent last month, how much came back, and through which channel.
What to ask for
Ask your agency for one report (and see the six questions for the rest): leads by channel, deduplicated; how many became paid jobs; and the revenue those jobs collected according to your shop system. If that report cannot be produced, cost per lead is the only thing anyone can tell you — and now you know what it is worth.