Performance marketing
Cheap leads can make growth expensive.
Cost per enquiry is useful. It becomes misleading when it stands in for the quality of the conversation that follows.
The denominator changes the story.
Imagine two hypothetical campaigns with the same spend. One generates more forms; the other produces more qualified conversations. Calling the first campaign the winner because its cost per form is lower settles the question before examining the outcome.
The problem is not the cost-per-lead metric itself. It is the assumption that every counted lead represents the same opportunity.
Define useful before optimising for more.
Agree the conditions that make an enquiry relevant: the need, territory, offer fit and any other justified criteria. Keep contactability separate from qualification. A person you cannot reach and a person who does not fit the offer are different problems.
Then make those dispositions usable for the team. A sophisticated qualification model that nobody updates provides less practical feedback than a small, consistently maintained set of stages.
Diagnose the part that changed.
| Observation | Investigate before concluding |
|---|---|
| More forms, less relevance | Targeting and the promise in the ad |
| Relevant enquiries, few contacts | Contact details, response and assignment |
| Good conversations, little progression | Offer fit and the sales process |
| Different totals in each report | Definitions, periods and duplication |
Give the campaign team something actionable.
A report saying “bad leads” does not identify a change. A report showing service mismatches from a particular message gives the team a hypothesis to test. The feedback should be specific enough to change the next decision.
Do not attribute every lost opportunity to advertising. Sales handling, product fit and availability can affect the outcome. Equally, do not use those dependencies to avoid investigating weak acquisition.
A practical next step.
Take a recent, manageable set of enquiries and follow each into the operational record. Note which stage can be verified and where the evidence stops. That exercise can reveal a measurement problem, a handoff problem or a campaign problem before you decide to buy more demand.
Calculate the different lead costs · Explore performance marketing