Cost Per Lead Calculator

The numbers behind your pricing

Cost per lead (CPL) is the marketing metric everyone quotes and almost nobody uses correctly. It tells you what you paid for each inbound contact, but it says nothing about whether those contacts turn into paying customers. A $15 lead that never closes is more expensive than a $100 lead that closes every time. The number that actually determines whether a marketing channel is worth keeping is cost per acquisition (CPA) — what you paid per customer who actually bought.

This calculator gives you both. Enter spend, leads, and your close rate, and it shows CPL and CPA side by side. The close rate is the bridge between them, and it's the variable contractors most often overestimate. If you think you close 40% but you actually close 20%, your real CPA is double what you believe — and a channel that looks profitable is quietly losing money.

The decision rule is simple: compare CPA to your average gross profit per job. If a customer costs $250 to acquire and your average job grosses $1,800, the channel is printing money and you should pour more in. If CPA is $700 on a $900 job, the channel is a loss leader at best and a money pit at worst — and no amount of volume fixes a unit economics problem. The fix is to improve close rate, raise prices, or cut the channel.

Run this for every channel separately — Google Ads, SEO, lead services, direct mail, referrals. Channels that look identical on CPL often look completely different on CPA once close rate is factored in. The contractors who grow fastest aren't the ones with the cheapest leads; they're the ones who know their true CPA per channel and double down on the winners.