What can you afford to pay for a lead?
Almost every argument about whether ads are working is really an argument about this one number, and most people running the ads have never worked it out. Set your own figures and find your ceiling.
Live tool. Pick your industry for a starting point, then overwrite every number with your own. Nothing is saved and nothing is sent.
Start below- Gross profit per sale
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- Lifetime gross profit per customer
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- Breakeven cost per lead
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- Max cost to acquire a customer
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- Profit per lead at today's cost
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- Effective return on ad spend
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Four steps, nothing hidden
Every figure on this page comes out of the same short chain. Follow it once and you will be able to argue with the number rather than take our word for it.
What one sale actually leaves you. Profit per sale.
Repeat work and referrals, not only the first job. Profit per customer.
Most leads never buy, so the value spreads across all of them. Profit per lead.
Whatever is left is spendable. Your ceiling.
Step 03 on its own is your breakeven cost per lead — the point where a lead pays for itself and nothing more.
Buying purchases rather than leads, as most ecommerce does, skips step 03 entirely: the conversion has already happened by the time you are charged, so the ceiling is measured per customer and the conversion rate only tells you what a click is worth.
The parts people argue about
My cost per lead is above the ceiling. Do I stop advertising?
Usually no. It means one of four things is wrong, and only the last is a reason to quit: the targeting is too broad, the landing page converts badly, the leads are not followed up fast enough, or the offer genuinely cannot support paid acquisition in your market. Three of those are fixable in weeks, and conversion rate is nearly always the cheapest lever.
Why does the lifetime multiple change the answer so much?
Because it decides whether you are buying one job or a relationship. A business that never sees a customer twice has to make the whole return on the first sale. One with genuine repeat and referral can outbid it on every click and still make more money.
Should I use this per channel or overall?
Per channel, once you have the volume to trust it. Search, paid social and lead marketplaces convert at very different rates, so a blended ceiling hides a channel that is quietly losing money behind one that is carrying it.
What counts as a lead?
Anyone who raised their hand — form fill, phone call, chat, whatever your intake is. Be consistent. Counting form fills but not phone calls is the most common reason a cost per lead looks worse on paper than it is in reality. If you sell online you are not buying leads at all, you are buying purchases, so switch the industry to Ecommerce and the whole tool measures per order instead.
So which one is it?
This gives you the ceiling. What it cannot tell you is whether the gap between your ceiling and your actual cost is a bidding problem, a landing page problem or a follow-up problem — and those three have completely different fixes.
- We look at your real account data, not a benchmark
- You get the specific bottleneck, ranked by what moves the number fastest
- If your ceiling says paid acquisition doesn't work in your market, we'll tell you that too
Get in touch
A short reply from a human, usually the same day.