The average amount you spend on advertising to generate one new lead — one person who raises their hand and shows interest in what you sell.
Cost per lead is a simple division: take what you spent on a campaign and divide it by the number of leads it produced. Spend €2,000 and get 100 enquiries, and your CPL is €20. It's one of the most common numbers marketers watch, because it tells you at a glance how expensive it is to fill the top of your sales funnel.
But CPL only counts how many leads you got — not how good they were. That's its biggest weakness, and the reason chasing a low CPL can quietly cost you money.
A commercial cleaning company runs two ad campaigns. Campaign A has a CPL of €15 and brings in 200 leads, mostly tiny one-off jobs. Campaign B has a CPL of €45 and brings in 60 leads, but these are office managers with recurring monthly contracts. On paper Campaign A looks three times cheaper. In reality, Campaign B's leads convert into €18,000 of annual contracts, while Campaign A's barely cover their own cost. The "expensive" campaign is the profitable one.
CPL is useful, but on its own it pushes ad platforms to chase the cheapest possible leads — which are often the lowest quality. If you tell the platform how much each lead is actually worth, it can stop optimising for cheap volume and start optimising for value. You might pay a higher CPL and still earn far more, because the leads turn into real customers. Volume is easy; profitable leads are what grow a business.
Marketing qualified lead (MQL) · Lead scoring · Conversion value · Customer lifetime value (LTV) · ROAS
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