Driving online leads is one thing, having us marketers 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 on every key event 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 Google to prioritize different types of contact (chat windows, phone calls, online forms, newsletter sign-ups, etc.).

Lifetime value (LTV) is a slightly different take, relegated to those with repeat customers or ongoing services of some sort. What I like 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.