Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Definition:

Cost per Lead (CPL) represents how much money it takes to generate a new prospective customer for your sales team from a marketing campaign. It’s valuable because it shows whether your marketing efforts are proving effective or burning through too much money.

What is a typical cost per lead?

It depends! Every industry has a different sales journey before converting prospects into customers. After all, you don’t buy a TV the same way as a car. Fortunately, organizations have compiled average CPLs per industry to use as a benchmark for your marketing campaigns. Here are a couple of good ones to reference:
Madison Logic
GoConvert

How do you calculate cost per lead?

The equation to calculate CPL is pretty straightforward:
Cost per Lead = Total Ad Spend / Total Attributed Leads
Bear in mind that you should calculate separate CPLs across different campaign platforms. Your data will be significantly less reliable if your CPL metric is a combination of results from Google Ads, emails, Facebook ads, etc

Cost per lead example

Imagine your company launched a $10,000 Facebook marketing campaign at the beginning of the year that generated 500 leads. Given our formula above, that means your average CPL is $20.

And remember, while we all want as low a CPL as possible, what makes a good CPL depends entirely on your industry. If your business is in media and publishing, a $20 CPL is expensive, and you should reassess your marketing approach. But if you’re running a software firm, you’d be thrilled by that result.