Every ad platform reports on leads, because leads are what the platform can see. Your bank only sees jobs. I’ve started calling the first one platform maths and the second one bank maths, and the gap between the two is where most marketing budgets quietly leak.
So, the short answer. Cost per lead tells you what an enquiry cost. Cost per booked job tells you what a customer cost. You work it out by dividing ad spend by booked jobs, or by dividing cost per lead by the share of leads you actually book. And once you do, you’ll sometimes find that the campaign with expensive leads is your cheapest source of jobs, and the one with cheap leads is costing you a fortune.
The problem with cost per lead
Cost per lead is easy to measure and easy to improve. That’s the problem with it.
You can always get cheaper leads. Broaden the targeting. Make the form shorter. Offer something free. Each of those will bring your cost per lead down, and each one can quietly fill your phone with people who were never going to book anything.
We learnt this on our own ads, not a client’s. When we ran Facebook lead forms for the agency, the leads were cheap and the dashboard looked lovely. Then I rang the first five and none of them answered. On paper that campaign was a success. In the bank it was nothing at all.
The maths, with one example
Two campaigns, same month, same business:
| Campaign A | Campaign B | |
|---|---|---|
| Ad spend | $2,000 | $2,000 |
| Leads | 40 | 16 |
| Cost per lead | $50 | $125 |
| Share of leads that book | 1 in 10 | 1 in 2 |
| Booked jobs | 4 | 8 |
| Cost per booked job | $500 | $250 |
Campaign A wins on the dashboard, and most people would put more money into it. Campaign B wins in the bank, with twice the jobs for the same spend. If cost per lead was the only number you looked at, you’d cut the wrong one, and you’d never know.
The formula isn’t complicated:
Cost per booked job = ad spend ÷ booked jobs
Or, if all you have handy is your cost per lead: cost per lead ÷ the share of leads you book. A $125 lead with a one in two booking rate is $125 ÷ 0.5, so $250 a job.
What it looks like when you track all the way to the job
The results we talk about most are the ones measured in revenue rather than leads, and that’s not an accident.
SEQ Blocked Drains turned $13,000 of Google Ads spend into about $80,000 of revenue in 30 days. Vic Flooring Group turned $3,500 into $60,000 in its first three months. Neither of those numbers came out of Google Ads. They came from sitting down and matching leads to paid jobs, which is tedious and worth every minute. The stories are in the SEQ Blocked Drains and Vic Flooring Group case studies.
How to track cost per booked job
You don’t need fancy software for this. You need five habits, and the first one is the hard one.
- Count leads properly. Calls and forms, each counted once. If your ads report more leads than you actually got, fix that before anything else. Our Google Ads audit checklist shows you how to check.
- Note where every lead came from. Google Ads, Facebook, your Google profile, a referral. Call tracking numbers make this automatic for phone calls, which is most of them for a trade.
- Mark which leads booked. In ServiceM8, simPRO, Tradify, Cliniko or a spreadsheet. Whatever you already use is fine, as long as you use it.
- Add the value. What the job was worth, or roughly what the customer spent. Rough is fine to start with.
- Send it back to the platforms. Google Ads and Meta both let you upload booked jobs and sales against the original click. Once you do, their bidding starts chasing jobs instead of enquiries.
That last step is where things really change. Once Google knows which clicks turned into $3,000 jobs and which ones turned into nothing, it bids differently, and you’ll see it in the quality of the leads within a few weeks. We set this up as part of our conversion tracking work, and it’s the part of the job I’d never skip.
What’s a good cost per booked job?
There’s no industry number that’s right for your business, so be wary of anyone who quotes you one. It depends on what a job is worth to you and what you keep from it.
Start here: take your average profit on a job, and decide what share of that you’re happy to spend winning the job in the first place. If a typical job leaves you $1,000 in profit and you’d spend up to a third of it on marketing, your ceiling is about $330 per booked job.
Then think about what a customer who comes back is worth. A dental patient who stays for years, or a strata manager who sends you every job in the building, is worth far more than the first invoice, and that should change how much you’re willing to pay to win them.
Why the platforms won’t tell you any of this
Google and Meta can’t see your job book, so they report what they can see, and each of them counts every customer it touched along the way. Run both and they’ll often both claim the same customer. We explain how that happens in how Google and Meta double dip on your ad spend.
That isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just platform maths doing what platform maths does. The fix is to keep the real count yourself, in one place you trust.
Questions people ask me about this
What’s the difference between cost per lead and cost per acquisition?
Cost per lead is what each enquiry cost you. Cost per acquisition is what each customer cost you. The catch is that platforms often call any conversion an “acquisition”, so check what’s actually being counted before you trust the label.
What’s a good booking rate?
It varies a lot by industry, and even more by how fast leads get called back. Measure your own for a month before you compare it with anyone else’s.
Why does Google show more conversions than I have jobs?
Usually because it counts every enquiry, including the people who never booked, and sometimes it counts the same enquiry twice. That gap is exactly why cost per booked job is worth tracking.
Can I do this without a CRM?
Yes. A spreadsheet with the date, the source, booked yes or no, and the job value is enough to start, and plenty of our clients never go further than that.
Want to see your real cost per job?
Book a call with me. Bring a month of leads and jobs if you have them, and we’ll work out what each source is actually costing you. Here’s how we run Google Ads and Facebook and Instagram ads, reported on numbers your bank would agree with.
