What one enquiry costs, and what it costs once the unqualified half is priced in. Fill in two of the three.
Fill in any two of spend, leads and cost per lead. Add your qualification and close rates and the cheap number turns into the real one.
Everything here is worked out in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and there is no account to make.
Leave this blank to work it out from the other two.
Optional. The share of leads sales accepts. Gives a cost per qualified lead.
Optional. Applied to qualified leads when you give a qualification rate, and to all leads when you do not.
Result
The numbers below are an example so the tool opens working. Replace them with yours.
What comes out
How to use it
Everything you paid, and the enquiries it produced. Be clear what counts as a lead before you start.
The share sales accepts. This is where two channels at the same cost per lead stop looking alike.
Applied to the qualified leads when you gave a qualification rate, and to every lead when you did not. The tool says which it used.
Cost per lead is spend divided by enquiries. It is the cheapest figure to report and the easiest to improve, because you can lower it by lowering the bar.
Two channels at 25 per lead can be nothing alike. If one qualifies at 35% and the other at 10%, the real costs are 71 and 250 for the same headline number.
This is why the qualification rate is asked for on the same screen rather than left as something to work out later. The comparison people need is one field away.
A close rate measured on qualified leads and applied to every lead produces a pipeline forecast that cannot happen. It is a common error and it is invisible: both numbers are real, they just belong to different denominators.
The tool applies the close rate to the qualified leads whenever you give it a qualification rate, and to all leads when you do not. Either way, the result says which one it used.
The last line is a cost per customer from media alone. Add salaries and tools and it becomes CAC, which has its own page.
The tool
Leave spend, leads or the cost per lead blank and the tool works out that one.
Cost per qualified lead is always higher than the headline, and the gap is what the leads sales rejects are costing you.
With a close rate you get the customers and the cost per customer from the same spend.
The result says whether the close rate was applied to qualified leads or to all of them, because the two produce very different forecasts.
Cost per customer here is media only. It does not quietly become a CAC.
Disagreement of more than one percent is named rather than resolved for you.
Reading the result
We look at your search visibility across Google and the answer engines, and tell you what is costing you orders. No charge for the first look.
In practice
Run both at their own qualification rates. The cheaper source loses this comparison more often than the report suggests.
A cost per qualified lead target survives a conversation with sales. A cost per lead target does not.
Enter the customers you need and work backwards to the spend, through both rates rather than one.
A shorter form usually lowers cost per lead and the qualification rate together. This is where you see whether it was worth it.
Questions
Whatever you decide, as long as it stays the same across every channel you compare. A newsletter signup and a demo request are both leads and they are not comparable, so mixing them makes the cheaper channel look better than it is.
It depends on the close rate and the deal size behind it. A 300 lead is cheap for a 40,000 contract and impossible for a 400 one. Published benchmarks average across both.
A lead is an enquiry and an acquisition is a completed action, usually a purchase or a signup. Cost per lead sits earlier in the funnel and is always smaller.
Only if it was measured on all leads. Close rates are usually measured on qualified ones, and applying that rate to every lead inflates the forecast by exactly your unqualified share.
Add the salaries, retainers and tools that produced the leads to the spend, then divide by customers. The CAC calculator does that, and it is a larger number by definition.
No. Everything is worked out in your browser, with no account and nothing uploaded.
The rest of the set
A lead has no value until someone qualifies it, so cost per lead can fall while cost per customer rises. The gap between those two numbers is where most B2B budgets go wrong.
Where this comes up
