It is the most common question in a first call, and it cannot be answered as asked. $85 is excellent for one business and ruinous for another in the same trade one town over. Here is what actually determines the answer.
A cost per lead from a forum post, a competitor or a case study is not comparable to yours unless all four of these line up. They rarely do.
One business counts every form fill. Another counts only qualified appointments. The second will always look more expensive per lead and may be running the far better campaign.
$85 a lead against a $400 job is a different business from $85 against a $14,000 roof. Cost per lead is meaningless without the value of what a lead becomes.
At a 20% close rate, $85 a lead is $425 per customer. At 50%, it is $170. The same lead cost describes two completely different economics.
Auction prices are local. A metro with six well-funded competitors bidding on the same keywords costs multiples of a rural market, and no national average captures that.
Cost per acquired customer — ad spend divided by jobs actually won — removes the two biggest sources of confusion at once. It does not care how you define a lead, and it already accounts for your close rate. Set it against your average job value and you have a ratio that means something: what you spend to earn a dollar.
Most importantly it can be compared across campaigns and platforms without any of the caveats above, because both halves come from your own books. The campaign with the worst cost per lead is often the best on cost per customer, and that reversal is the single most common surprise when a business first sees closed revenue attributed properly.
The only benchmark that fully applies to you is your own past. Vertical averages are useful for a sanity check — an order of magnitude, not a target. Your cost per customer this quarter against last quarter, on the same definitions, is the comparison that can actually be trusted.
Every won job needs to point back to the campaign that started it, including jobs that closed weeks after the first click.
If most of your leads call, attribution that only covers web forms is measuring the minority of your business.
Whatever you choose, apply it consistently across every campaign and platform, or the comparison breaks before it starts.
Judge on a period longer than your actual sales cycle. A 30-day read on a 60-day cycle systematically undercounts your best campaigns.
Book a demo and we'll work through your real numbers — spend, close rate and job value — rather than an industry average.