Cost Per Lead

What does Cost Per Lead mean?

The key figure Cost per lead indicates how cost-effective your marketing campaigns are in generating new leads for your sales team. A lead is a person who has expressed interest in your product or service through a given interaction. This metric is closely related to other important business metrics, such as the cost of acquiring new customers. The purpose of this metric is to provide your marketing team with a tangible value to help them understand how much money is appropriate to spend on acquiring new leads.

The key figure Cost per lead also provides important data that you can use for your return on marketing investment calculation. In fact, each stage of the sales funnel should be linked to similar metrics, such as cost per visitor and cost per sale. Similarly, these metrics can be used to analyze individual campaigns such as AdWords, Banner advertisingsocial media ads or the sum of your marketing activities.

Cost per lead example

Below you will find an example:

Imagine that a company spent $100 on your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and 10 users convert into leads:

Cost Per Lead = 100€/10

= 10€

If these costs are too high for the advertising campaign of your product or service, you need to adjust the corresponding pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns appropriately. The cost per click varies widely by industry. Accordingly, for example, a company selling luxury cars will aim for a different value for the cost of a prospect than, say, a toy store.

Cost Per Lead Benchmarks

The cost per lead varies significantly across industries. Here are some expert tips and rules of thumb:

Cost per lead Success indicators
The ultimate goal, of course, is to minimize your cost per lead. Low cost per lead with a high volume of quality leads is a good indicator that your campaign is doing well, but if your cost per lead is too high, it's extremely difficult to justify continuing the campaign.
How to monitor the cost per lead in real time
Once you have key figures to measure the Cost Per Lead you should set up processes to monitor these and other marketing KPIs. Dashboards can be very beneficial in this regard, as you can clearly analyze all the essential factors.

« Back to Glossary Index

FAQ

What is a cost per lead?

Cost per lead (CPL) is a metric that indicates the average amount a company spends for each lead it generates. CPL is often used by companies to measure the effectiveness of various advertising and marketing campaigns.

How to calculate CPL?

CPL is calculated by dividing the total cost of a campaign by the number of leads it generated. For example, if a company spent $500 on a campaign and generated 50 leads, the CPL would be $10 (500/50 = 10).

Why is CPL important?

CPL is an important metric because it helps companies measure the effectiveness of their advertising and marketing campaigns. It can also help a company make a comparison between different campaigns so that it can adjust and improve its strategy.

What is the cost of a lead?

The cost of a lead depends on various factors such as the medium through which they are generated and the target group. For some campaigns and target groups, the cost per lead can be very high, while other campaigns and target groups have a lower CPL.

How to lower CPL?

There are a few ways companies can lower their cost per lead, including optimizing existing campaigns, choosing the right audience, and using targeting and personalized campaigns.

How high can the cost per lead be?

Cost per lead depends on many factors such as medium, target audience, type of campaign and budget. CPL can be very low or very high depending on these factors.

What is the difference between CPA and CPL?

The difference between Cost per Action (CPA) and Cost per Lead (CPL) is that CPA indicates the average cost amount per fully completed action (e.g., an order, a registration, etc.), while CPL indicates the average cost amount for each lead generated.

Are there any specific tips to lower CPL?

To lower the CPL, companies should conduct A/B testing to identify the optimal advertising and marketing campaigns, they can also review the target audience and ensure they are sending relevant campaigns to the right audience.

Can you lower the CPL with a single campaign?

Yes, the cost per lead can be reduced by optimizing a single campaign. To do this, companies need to review the campaign to find out what works and what doesn't and then adjust the campaign accordingly.

What other metrics can be used to measure the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns?

In addition to CPL, companies can also use other metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), return on investment (ROI), and cost per click (CPC) to measure the effectiveness of their advertising and marketing campaigns.

With top positions to the new sales channel.

Let Google work for you, because visitors become customers.

Niels Stuck

Niels Stuck has 10 years of SEO experience and is the founder of the SEO agency "WOLF OF SEO". He gained practical experience by building 20+ affiliate sites alongside his marketing studies. Finally, he wrote his bachelor thesis about the influence of SEO on Google rankings, traffic and sales development in the form of a case study. Today, he specializes in e-commerce SEO and helps more than 80 companies build a sustainable organic revenue channel through SEO. Niels advises startups, established brands and corporations in search engine optimization of their online stores and primarily focuses on data-based content strategies and link building. He shares his knowledge about SEO and online marketing in this blog, as a speaker at conferences, in podcasts and as a guest author for OMT, Forbes, Starting Up and many more platforms.

All contributions

Social Media & Links: