For lead gen campaigns, most businesses track leads as the Primary Conversion whether it’s a form submission, call, chat initiation or even booking a Zoom call. The KPI is typically cost per lead or lead volume in this case.

This is OK and is better than making cost per click (CPC) your KPI but it’s still not great. You still need to decide if you want the cost per lead to be the KPI or total lead volume because these metrics do not always coincide. Generally the lower your drive your cost per lead the fewer overall leads you’ll get too so keep this in mind.

The problem with making cost per lead or lead volume your KPI? All leads are not created equal and when cost per lead is your main KPI you end up valuing all the leads the same because you don’t have any data on which leads became a sale and optimizing a campaign to achieve a lower cost per lead doesn’t not mean it’s going to be more profitable. 

After seeing offline sales conversion data in mature Google Ad accounts, sometimes the most profitable keywords, locations, demographics etc. aren’t generating the lowest cost per lead. So if you aren’t tracking offline sales conversions, you may end up excluding some of the most profitable keywords, locations, demographics just because they aren’t generating the cheapest cost per lead.

Even if you’re able to track sales coming from Google Ads in your CRM, if you’re not pushing the data back to Google Ads, using offline conversion tracking, you’re not going to be able to optimize the campaign to increase sales.

At the end of the day, leads don’t pay the bills, sales do. Because of this, it’s always best to track sales conversions so you can use either sales conversions, total sales revenue or ROAS as the main KPI. 

Tracking offline sales conversions can be tricky however, which is why most businesses don’t do it. Fortunately, we have a free PDF you can download that will show you how to set it up the easy way.

Some marketing agencies take the stance of “Well, it’s not our responsibility to deliver sales, we’re just marketing. It’s only our job to deliver leads. We can’t help how effective their sales team is.”

I don’t think this is correct. The goal for marketing should also be to generate sales, not just leads.