01Why look at the whole funnel
An ad account reports clicks and conversions. Your bank account reports customers and revenue. In between sit two or three steps that the ads never see: the landing page turning visits into enquiries, and you or your team turning enquiries into paid work. Most of the money in a lead generation business is made or lost in those steps.
Putting all of it on one line shows where the leak is. Two businesses with identical cost per lead can have a threefold difference in cost per customer because one answers the phone faster.
02The rates at each step
- Click to lead: leads divided by clicks. This is your landing page conversion rate, and it is mostly decided by the page, the offer and how well the search matched it.
- Lead to customer: customers divided by leads. Your close rate. Speed of response, follow-up and price all live here.
- Click to customer: the two multiplied together. Small numbers, usually well under 5%, which is why small changes upstream matter so much.
The first tab works these out from real counts. Use one consistent period, and count leads the way your business does: real calls and form submissions, not every click on a phone number.
03Which lever to pull first
The forecast tab shows what one extra percentage point at each step is worth. With the example figures, a landing page that converts 7% instead of 6% adds two and a half customers a month for the same spend. Closing 26% of leads instead of 25% adds less than one. Your numbers will differ, but the pattern is common: the smaller the rate, the more one point is worth.
Both beat the instinctive fix, which is cutting the budget or chasing cheaper clicks. Neither touches the steps where most of the value is lost. If the page is the weak link, that is what our landing page work is for.
04Check the counting first
All of this assumes the lead count is honest. Accounts routinely count page views, button clicks or "directions" taps as conversions, which inflates the click-to-lead rate and hides a poor close rate behind it. If your conversion rate looks too good to be true next to your actual enquiries, it probably is, and fixing the tracking comes before any of the maths here.