Driving online leads has us marketers constantly looking for ways and places to find a lower CPA and more lead volume. That’s only part of the story, though, and I’ve personally been in a position where blindly chasing a lower CPA would have tanked my profitability. A number of years ago, I’ll call it “a few”, I was spending six figures a day with Google Ads, driving tens of thousands of mortgage applications every month. Remember when the subprime mortgage crisis crippled the global economy? I’m not to blame on that one, and in fact that subprime stuff is what I’m talking about avoiding; I quickly found that “bad credit ok” messaging would drive my CTR up, CPC down, CPA way down, and on paper I’m looking good! Not so much, because we monitored the credit tier and loan details of every lead, and we quickly pivoted. We went so far as to use “bad credit” terms as negatives everywhere. We also had to update affiliate agreements, a “safe CPA” agreement is not safe when the affiliate catches on to what we did.

It’s difficult for any of us to assign a value to each lead that comes in the door, but it’s critical that we all try. Even if you can’t ID a value on a lead, like that of a website contact form with just a few basic fields, consider assigning a value to key events or user actions on your site. Use a scale of 1 to 100 and just assign a value, where it’s less about the real monetary value and more about how you want the ad platform to prioritize different types of conversions. You might have calls from ads, clicks to call (from a Google business profile or the site), a contact form, a purchase, a booking, and so-on. You can use a larger scale as well, maybe 1 to 1,000; aim to make it a realistic depiction of monetary value without overthinking it, because the important part is how each conversion compares to the next. The point here is to test ROI oriented bid strategies, or otherwise push for more value and get away from the thought that all conversion events are equal, because they’re not.

Lifetime value (LTV) is a slightly different take, normally relegated to those with repeat customers or ongoing services of some sort. What I look for here is the opportunity to label each lead as it comes into the CRM, with information as to where the lead came from. Even something as simple as replicating your landing page (no-follow tags on the new clones, you’re just using them for paid ad landers) so that technically, you’re using multiple forms and can easily tell your CRM which of the forms created each new lead. There are other ways, of course, but you’ll need the source info directly connected to the individual entry in your CRM, which lends the downstream, “lifetime” information that you need here. If you can make that connection, you’re very likely to find something interesting in the data.

Even without source-specific CRM lead information to pilfer, you can at least understand your average, overall customer and what revenue they drive over a particular amount of time (average customer duration, preferably). Don’t forget to lend some credit to the initial point of capture, when it comes to the revenue you might see from digital retargeting campaigns, email retention campaigns, and other downstream points of contact with your customers. If you happen to be a lead generator and you make money 30-90 days after you sell a lead, we should talk.

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