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Cost per Lead

Cost per lead is what you spent on ads divided by the leads they brought. At HeadHoncho it is your ad spend divided by your jobs, our own two counts.

By Ariel Tarayants, founder · Updated

What is cost per lead? It is what you spent on ads divided by the leads they brought. Here is the rule we use, an example, and the one thing the number cannot tell you.

What Is Cost per Lead? The Definition

Cost per lead is ad spend divided by leads. A lead is a job with a name, a phone and an address. HeadHoncho uses its own two counts: what the platform charged you, and the jobs that came from that platform. It never uses Google's price per click.

A Worked Example

Example numbers. You spend $3,000 on Google Ads in a month. 20 jobs come in with Google Ads as their source. Cost per lead is $3,000 ÷ 20 = $150. On the Statistics screen the Cost per lead tile shows $150 and prints both numbers under it, so you can redo the sum.

The same rule works for a campaign. Spend $900, 6 jobs, $150 each. A campaign that spent $400 and brought no job costs nothing per lead, because it has no lead. Its $400 shows as Spend with no lead. Lead cost plus spend with no lead equals your ad spend, so no dollar goes missing.

How It Is Usually Miscounted

  • Using the click price. A click price tells you what Google charged for a visit. It says nothing about what a job cost. Ten clicks at $8 is $80, and if none became a job, the job cost is not $8.
  • Using the platform's own lead count. A platform counts form fills, short calls and repeat callers as leads. Your job count does not.
  • Mixing sources. Divide Google spend by Google jobs. Dividing it by every job flatters the number.
  • Dropping the spend that brought nothing. A campaign with no job still cost money.

The Limit

Cost per lead does not tell you if the job made money. A $150 lead on a $2,400 door can be a good buy. The same $150 on a $200 repair that cancelled is not. For that you need the price of a booked job and what was left after the sub. Read Cost Per Booked Job, Explained.

For a sense of range, LocaliQ's 2025 search benchmarks put the home-services median at $90.92 per lead (3,211 campaigns, April 2024 to March 2025). That is the platform's own lead count, so it is not the same as spend divided by your jobs.

ROAS, offline conversion, lead source, closing rate and what counts as a lead. In the app the rule is documented on the Statistics page.

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