What a lead is actually worth before you spend on ads

Before spending a pound or a dollar on ads, work out one number: what an average job is actually worth to you after materials and labour, and what percentage of enquiries turn into a booked job. Without both of those, any ad spend is a guess dressed up as a strategy.

Take your average job value, multiply by your enquiry-to-booking rate, and you get what a single enquiry is actually worth to the business. If a job is worth £1,200 profit and one in five enquiries books, an enquiry is worth roughly £240 to you. That's the ceiling for what you can sensibly pay to generate one.

Most trade businesses skip this and instead judge ad performance by cost-per-click or impressions, numbers that feel measurable but don't actually tell you whether the spend is profitable.

This number also tells you where to focus first. If your enquiry-to-booking rate is low, the problem usually isn't the ads, it's the website or the follow-up process losing enquiries after they arrive. Fixing that is often cheaper than spending more to generate additional traffic into the same leaky process.

Once you know what a lead is genuinely worth, every marketing decision gets simpler: a channel is either producing leads under that number, which is worth scaling, or above it, which needs fixing or stopping.