The monthly review comes round. Marketing shows a healthy cost per lead. Sales says the leads were poor. Both are looking at real numbers, and neither can say what a site visit cost, let alone a booking.
Often that argument isn’t about the leads at all. It’s about the join between ad spend and what happened in the CRM. This guide shows how to make that join, where it breaks, and gives you a calculator to try your own numbers.
In short, cost per site visit is your ad spend divided by the site visits that spend produced. Cost per booking is the same spend divided by bookings. Both need each lead tied to the campaign it came from, and each visit and booking tied to that lead.
Cost per lead, cost per site visit and cost per booking
| Number | How to work it out |
|---|---|
| Cost per lead | Spend ÷ leads |
| Cost per site visit | Spend ÷ site visits that happened |
| Cost per booking | Spend ÷ bookings |
Count visits that happened, not visits booked. Count bookings once the booking form is signed or the token is paid, whichever your team uses, and use the same rule every month.
Work out your own cost per site visit
Change any number below. The rest updates as you type.
| Stage | Count | Cost each |
|---|---|---|
| Leads | 500 | ₹2,000 |
| Site visits | 50 | ₹20,000 |
| Bookings | 5 | ₹2,00,000 |
The starting numbers are an example, not a benchmark. Nothing you type leaves this page.
Why cost per booking often comes out wrong
If your numbers look odd, check the CRM before the maths. These are the five gaps we look for first.
- The lead source is blank or vague. “Facebook” isn’t enough. You need the campaign, and ideally the ad.
- The created date is the import date. If leads were moved from an old CRM, their created date may be the day of the move, not the day of the enquiry.
- Visits aren’t marked. If the visit lives in a register or a sales person’s phone, it never reaches the report.
- One buyer, several leads. The same person enquires from a portal and an ad. Count the buyer once, and decide which source gets the credit.
- The months don’t line up. A lead from March may visit in April. Count visits and bookings against the month of the enquiry, so each month’s spend is judged on what it brought.
How to join Meta and Google ad spend to CRM stages
- Export spend by campaign and day from each ad account.
- Store the campaign on every lead. For Meta lead forms, keep the lead id, which Meta can map back to the ad, ad set and campaign (Meta lead retrieval). For Google ads, keep the click id (Google offline conversions).
- Mark each visit and booking on the lead, with its date.
- Group by campaign and by month of enquiry, then divide.
Who does what
If you own the marketing budget, your part is the campaign on every lead. If you’re the CRM or analytics person, yours is clean dates and one record per buyer. If you run pre-sales, yours is marking every visit the day it happens. When all three are in place, the monthly review stops being an argument.
How Intend helps
Intend reads your ad spend and your CRM stages and shows cost per lead, site visit and booking for each campaign. Its agents also mark the visit on the lead when they book it.
Start with one project
Take last month’s spend for one project and run it through the calculator with your real counts. If you can’t fill in the visit rate with confidence, that tells you where to start. The weekly numbers that sit alongside this one are in the pre-sales playbook, and how Intend fits in is on Intend for real estate developers and pricing.