Add your spend and leads to get your cost per lead. Add how often leads become clients and what a client is worth, and we will show your cost per client, your ROI and the most a lead is worth to you.
Cost per lead is marketing spend divided by leads. £1,000 for 40 leads is £25 per lead. The most you can afford per lead is client value times the share of leads who buy. If 5% of leads buy a £1,500 offer, each lead is worth £75. Below that, your marketing pays for itself.
Who this is for: Coaches, consultants and founders paying for leads who want to know if the numbers work.
Cost per lead, or CPL, is what you spend on marketing divided by the number of leads it brings in. The formula is CPL = marketing spend ÷ leads.
Spend £1,000 on ads in a month and get 40 leads, and your cost per lead is £25. Count everything you spent to get those leads in the same period: the ad spend itself, plus any agency fee, funnel software or lead magnet costs if you want the full picture. Be clear about what a lead is. For most coaches and consultants it is someone who gave you their email or booked a call. Pick one meaning and stick to it, or month to month comparisons stop making sense.
In a spreadsheet, put spend in A2 and leads in B2, then use =A2/B2.
This is the number most people never work out, and it is the one that matters. Your break-even cost per lead is client value × lead-to-client rate. It tells you what a single lead is worth to you on average, before you have spoken to them.
If you sell a £1,500 programme and 5 out of every 100 leads become clients, each lead is worth £1,500 × 0.05 = £75. Pay less than £75 per lead and the marketing pays for itself. Pay more and you lose money on every lead you buy. The table shows how quickly that number moves.
| Client value | 2% become clients | 5% become clients | 10% become clients |
|---|---|---|---|
| £500 | £10 | £25 | £50 |
| £1,500 | £30 | £75 | £150 |
| £3,000 | £60 | £150 | £300 |
| £10,000 | £200 | £500 | £1,000 |
Look across a row. Doubling how many leads become clients doubles what you can afford per lead, without changing the ads at all. That is why we look at the close rate before we look at the ad account. Use profit per client in place of price if your delivery costs are high, so you are not counting money you never keep.
They measure three different points in the same journey.
A low CPL can hide a high CPA if the leads are poor or nobody follows them up. That is why we show all three. If you sell physical products and want to judge ads on revenue, our ROAS calculator works out your break-even return on ad spend from your margin.
A good cost per lead is any CPL comfortably below what a lead is worth to you. There is no universal number. A £40 lead is a bargain for a consultant selling a £10,000 engagement and a disaster for someone selling a £50 course. Benchmarks by industry vary so much by country, offer and lead definition that they rarely help. Your own break-even CPL from the table above is a far better target.
As a rough rule, we like to see CPL at no more than about half of break-even. That leaves room for months when ad prices rise or close rates dip, and it pays for the time you spend on sales calls. If you are close to break-even, a small change in either direction decides whether you make or lose money.
Also track how CPL changes over time on the same campaign. A slow rise often means the audience is getting tired of the ad. A sudden jump usually means something broke: a form, a page or a tracking pixel.
When cost per client is too high, people usually blame the ads. In our experience it is more often what happens after the lead. A lead who waits a day for a reply has often gone cold or booked with someone else. A booked call with no reminder often turns into a no-show. Those losses push your cost per client up, even when the ads are doing their job.
Not sure which step is losing the most? Put your monthly numbers into the funnel leak calculator and it will show the step that costs you the most clients.
CPL stands for cost per lead. It is your marketing spend divided by the number of leads it brought in, where a lead is someone who gave you their details or booked a call. £1,000 for 40 leads is a £25 CPL.
Take the revenue from clients the marketing brought in, subtract what you spent, then divide by what you spent. £3,000 back from £1,000 of spend is (£3,000 minus £1,000) ÷ £1,000 = 200% ROI. Use profit instead of revenue if your delivery costs are high.
No. Cost per lead is what it costs to get someone interested. Cost per acquisition is what it costs to win a paying client. If 1 in 20 leads becomes a client, your cost per acquisition is 20 times your cost per lead.
For the true cost, yes. Ad spend alone shows how the ads perform. Adding agency fees, software and lead magnet costs shows what each lead really costs your business. Pick one method and use it every month so the numbers compare.
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