Why cost per lead misleads you
Cost per lead tells you what it cost to make a phone ring. It says nothing about whether anyone answered, whether the lead was in your service area, or whether the job was profitable. A $40 lead you never contact is worse than a $120 lead that becomes an $8,000 fence.
1. Median lead response time
Time from lead created to first real contact attempt. Use the median, not the average — one lead answered in four days will skew an average badly. Under 60 seconds is the target.
2. Contact rate
The share of leads you actually spoke to, not the share you called once. This is the number that exposes broken follow-up faster than anything else. Below 60% means you are paying for leads your competitors are closing.
3. Lead-to-estimate rate
Of the leads that came in, how many turned into an estimate on the calendar? This separates a marketing problem from a sales-process problem. Low contact rate is operational. High contact rate with a low booking rate means the conversation itself needs work.
4. Close rate — by source and by estimator
Track it two ways. By source, because leads from your Google Business Profile usually close far better than shared marketplace leads, and blending them hides that. By estimator, because two people quoting the same jobs can sit twenty points apart and nobody notices.
5. Cost per booked job
Channel spend divided by jobs actually signed from that channel. This is the number to run your budget on. A channel with a high cost per lead and a great close rate can be your most profitable one.
6. Revenue by source, month over month
The final scoreboard. Once you can see revenue by channel across a season, budget decisions stop being arguments and become arithmetic. It also reveals seasonality clearly enough to plan ad spend and crew hiring around it.
How to actually track them
- →Every lead enters one CRM — no leads living in a phone, an inbox, or a notebook
- →A required source field on every lead, filled in at intake, never guessed later
- →Call tracking numbers on the website, Google Business Profile, and ads
- →Timestamps on the first contact attempt, logged automatically rather than by hand
- →One weekly 15-minute review of the six numbers, same day every week
The hard part is not the reporting; it is the CRM discipline underneath. If the data going in is unreliable, the dashboard is just a confident-looking guess.
Start with two
If tracking six feels like a project, start with response time and contact rate. They are the fastest to improve and they move every number downstream. See what we report on monthly →