What your ads really cost per enquiry.
Divide what you actually spent by the enquiries you actually received, over a period long enough to mean something. Platform cost-per-conversion is almost always lower than this, and the gap is the number worth understanding.
Why the platform figure is lower
Every one of these makes the reported cost look better than the real one.
- • A conversion may be a form view or a page visit rather than a genuine enquiry.
- • View-through attribution credits people who saw an ad and arrived some other way.
- • Phone calls often go uncounted entirely, which cuts the other way and hides real value.
- • Duplicate conversions from one person filling a form twice.
Calculating the honest number
Take total spend for a month across all campaigns. Take the enquiries you can actually attribute to advertising — forms, calls, bookings. Divide.
Compare that to what a customer is worth to you. If an enquiry costs more than a customer earns you, the campaign is losing money regardless of how good the platform dashboard looks.
Count the calls
Most local businesses take more enquiries by phone than by form, and platforms rarely see them. A campaign that looks unprofitable on form submissions alone can be comfortably profitable once calls are counted.
This is the most common reason a business turns off advertising that was actually working.
What to do with a bad number
Before cutting the budget, check where the traffic goes. A campaign sending people to a page with no phone number and no prices produces expensive enquiries because of the page, not the campaign.
Fixing the destination is usually cheaper and faster than rebuilding the campaign, and it improves every other source at the same time.
Find what is costing you search clicks, then watch the fix work.
VisitorPing reads your own Search Console data for the pages losing clicks, then rings your phone the moment someone lands on your website.