Cost per lead (CPL).
What you pay to generate one inquiry, before any of them turn into booked work.
What is cost per lead?
Cost per lead is channel spend divided by leads produced by that channel. It sits upstream of customer acquisition cost: CPL counts inquiries, CAC counts customers, and the gap between them is your booking and close rate.
Why it matters
A cheap lead source with a poor close rate can cost more per customer than an expensive one that converts. Judging channels on CPL alone is how shops end up buying volume they cannot turn into revenue. Always pair it with conversion rate.
How Lakehouse handles it
Source travels with the lead through to the invoice, so spend can be compared against revenue by channel. See lead attribution.
See how Lakehouse puts this to work for your shop.
Book a demoSee it on your own jobs.
Book a working session and free business audit with the Lakehouse team. Bring a real job, a real estimate, and a real question about running your business. We will show you how Lakehouse handles it.