During my time as a freelance copywriter for online businesses, I often found myself sitting in drawn-out marketing meetings.
60 minutes meeting? Felt like 5 hours.
And the best part? Most of it didn’t even involve me.
But there I was.
Absorbing every detail.
Now, before I go on a tangent and start ranting about meetings that are a waste of time…
One thing that consistently puzzled me when I was on these meetings was the fixation on Cost Per Lead (CPL).
When my clients ran Facebook Ads, their main concern seemed to be how low they could drive their CPL.
But I had to wonder: why?
Then it became clear to me.
To them, a lead was a lead.
No distinction between good or bad. Just a lead.
And if they could generate leads for less, it was a win.
But they were missing something crucial.
LEAD QUALITY.
They often found themselves generating thousands of leads with barely any sales to show for, rapidly burning through the ad budget for the month.
Let’s imagine it for a second.
Your CPL is $4, and you gather 1,000 leads. That’s a total of $4,000 spent.
But HOW do you know if that’s money well spent?
Should we simply look at the CPL and decide?
No, of course not.
The real measure is the revenue those leads generate for our business.
Now, let me clarify.
I’m not dismissing Cost Per Lead entirely. That would be shortsighted.
What I’m saying is that most people misinterpret its significance.
CPL needs context, and too often, that context gets ignored.
For me, I’d rather invest $100 in a single lead who turns into a loyal customer than spend the same amount on 50 leads that go nowhere.
But looking into your Meta Ads account and seeing that you’re paying $100 a lead is a scary sight.
Even if those leads are going on to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars.
We need to be able to take a step back and look at the full picture, seeing it as it truly is.
Not a zoomed-in version that makes it easy for us to feel worried.
So the moral of the story is this:
Focus on attracting the right leads into your world instead of trying to generate leads as cheaply as possible.