3 min readAs a Web Marketer, do you really know your Cost per lead ?

See your website like the city of Rome: it was not built in a day, though you wish to make all roads lead to it. Currently, you use several traffic channels to make people come on your website. As you know, your audience is appealed to your website from social networks, organic search, links from other websites, Google Adwords and so on, before getting converted into leads.

You will see here how to determine your cost per lead by taking in account the channel used by your target customer.

What is cost per lead in marketing?

A marketing expert like you has a specific budget for your online activity. Your objectives are defined by the ability to generate as many leads as possible while your business still makes profit. You also have to select the most profitable of your traffic channels by measuring their performance. So you must optimize precisely your cost per lead.

Your cost per lead is the average amount on money you have to pay to get one more lead. The schema below gives an illustration of how your Web traffic is organized to finally calculate your cost per lead:

Your visitors come to your website through several channels, such as social networks, organic search or Google Adwords. Once on your landing page, they can turn into leads by filling out a form or calling you directly. You plan to measure your investments depending on how many people will get engaged by filling out these forms or giving you phone calls. And this is what defines your cost per lead.

And your cost per lead is an overall amount, which includes the leads you generated with form-filling as well as those you got with phone calls with the phone number on your landing page.

How can you measure exactly you cost per lead online ?

You can use some efficient tools to calculate your cost per lead. These tools will allow you to know how many leads you have generated through form-filling and phone calling. They are nothing but Google Analytics and Call Tracking. They complete each other and enable you to compare simply and efficiently your traffic channels.

What’s more, to know whether organic search or Google Adwords is the most popular path to access your website and generate a lead, there is a dynamic number insertion (DNI) option available in Call Tracking. Using this, you can make your visitor see a different phone number on your landing page depending on where he came from. All of these numbers are redirected to your same business phone standard during a call. Though you can always detect who called you from what channel thanks to the real-time detailed reports provided by Call Tracking.

This way, you can measure the amount of leads generated by your traffic channels more easily, and know which of them are the most profitable. Thus, you can calculate exactly your real cost per lead. With a constant marketing budget, you can even reduce it by knowing precisely how many leads either forms or phone calls have generated. And you can also prove this data by adjusting your budget by following your ROI.