If you ask a marketing agency how a campaign is going, they will tell you the CPL. Cost per lead. £8.91. £14.20. £6.04. The number sounds clean. It is also nearly meaningless on its own.
The chain CPL hides
A 'lead' has six possible states by the time it reaches a trade business: form-filled, contacted, qualified, booked, quoted, won. CPL only measures the cost to get the first state. The other five matter more, individually and collectively.
- CPL (form fill)
- £8.91
- Cost per qualified lead
- £17.40
- Cost per booked visit
- £28.60
- Cost per quoted job
- £62.10
- Cost per won job
- £234.80
These are real numbers from one of our renovation clients. The CPL looks great. The cost per won job is also fine — given an average job size of £14,000, a £234.80 acquisition cost is excellent. But the chain matters. If we tweaked creative to drop CPL to £5.10 but the qualified rate halved, we would be worse off.
What we actually optimise on
Our default optimising metric for renovation clients is cost per qualified lead — meaning, lead has confirmed area, job type, and rough budget. Not won, because won is too lagged. Not raw form-fill, because it is too noisy. Qualified is the leading indicator that correlates best with revenue, on a one-to-two week lag.
How to track this if you have HighLevel or any decent CRM
- , Tag every lead with its source UTM at intake.
- , Add stage transitions: contacted → qualified → booked → quoted → won.
- , Compute cost per stage weekly, by source.
- , Make decisions based on cost per qualified lead, not raw CPL.
The agencies who win for trade businesses are the ones who can tell you, by source, what a customer is costing you per stage of the funnel. The ones who only tell you CPL are reporting, not optimising.