Ad platforms are very good at telling you that things are going great. You see high click through rates, strong engagement, and friendly “learning limited” warnings that nudge you to spend more on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and TikTok Ads.
None of that matters if you do not know one simple number for each channel: cost per lead. If you sell through calls, consults, or appointments, cost per lead (CPL) is the core metric that tells you whether a PPC campaign should keep running.
For e commerce brands and online stores, the same logic applies. You care about cost per add to cart, cost per checkout started, and cost per email captured. All of those are forms of leads for your Shopify or WooCommerce store. If the cost to get a serious shopper is higher than the profit you make per order, the campaign is not really working, no matter how nice the click through rate looks.
Why blended ROAS hides the truth
Before we go deeper, it helps to define a term that comes up in almost every marketing report.
ROAS stands for return on ad spend. It measures how much revenue you generate for every dollar of ad spend. A 4x ROAS means you brought in four dollars for every one dollar you spent.
A lot of businesses look at a single blended ROAS or a top level “money in versus money out” report across all paid media. It looks clean, but it hides where performance is actually coming from.
You might have:
- Google Search bringing in high intent leads at a healthy CPL.
- Meta retargeting campaigns that are cheap but mostly touch people who already intended to buy.
- TikTok traffic that looks good on paper but almost never fills out a form, starts a checkout, or books a call.
If you treat all of that as one bucket, you cannot cut the bad ad spend without also cutting the channels that are actually working. Blended ROAS turns your PPC reporting into a blur.
What cost per lead actually measures
Cost per lead is simple on paper:
CPL = total ad spend on a channel or campaign ÷ number of valid leads from that source.
The key word is “valid.”
A valid lead usually means:
- Real emails and phone numbers that pass basic verification.
- People who fit your service area, offer, or target customer profile.
- Deduped records, so the same person does not count as five separate leads across multiple funnels.
For e commerce, a “valid lead” can also mean a verified email captured from a pop up, a cart starter with a working email and phone, or a returning shopper who opted into SMS or email. You still need clean, verified data if you want your remarketing and email flows to pay off.
When CPL is based on that kind of clean lead data, it becomes a real decision tool instead of a vanity metric that just makes a dashboard look pretty.
The problem with siloed dashboards
By default, each ad platform only shows its own version of reality. Google Ads, Meta Ads, and TikTok Ads will all gladly claim credit for the same conversion if they can.
A marketing lead logs in and sees three different dashboards full of “good” PPC metrics:
- Strong click through rates.
- Healthy engagement.
- Plenty of “conversions” reported in each account.
There is no clear way to answer questions like:
- Which campaign actually produced the phone call or booked consult?
- Which ad group generates leads that close, not just leads that fill out a form?
- Which creative actually drives add to carts and checkouts for the online store?
- Where is the cheapest high intent traffic coming from right now?
The only way to answer those questions is to bring ad spend and lead data into the same place and tie every valid lead back to a channel and campaign.
How a unified CPL dashboard works
LeadBadger’s PPC tracking module connects to your ad accounts and your lead intake system. The goal is simple: show you cost per lead by channel, campaign, and when possible, by ad group or creative.
At a high level, the flow looks like this:
- Pull spend, impressions, clicks, and campaign structure from Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, and other platforms.
- Tag every incoming lead with its source and, when possible, the campaign, ad set, or ad that drove it.
- Validate contact data so fake leads and bots do not inflate your numbers.
- Count only valid, deduped leads for each source and calculate CPL for every channel and campaign.
Once that is set up, your PPC dashboard might show something like:
- Google Search – 42 valid leads – 2,520 dollars spend – 60 dollars CPL.
- Meta Lead Ads – 35 valid leads – 1,050 dollars spend – 30 dollars CPL.
- TikTok Video – 8 valid leads – 640 dollars spend – 80 dollars CPL.
If you are running an online store, you can slice the same data by cost per email captured, cost per add to cart, or cost per checkout started. That way you see exactly which campaigns are feeding your e commerce funnel, not just your traffic numbers.
Now you can see which channel is actually pulling its weight and which campaigns are driving real lead generation instead of empty clicks.
What to look at besides CPL
CPL is the starting point, not the finish line. A cheap lead that never closes is still expensive. A more costly lead that reliably becomes a high value customer can be a bargain.
Once you have cost per lead visible by channel, layer in a few more core marketing analytics metrics:
- Conversion rate from lead to customer by channel. Are Google leads closing at a higher rate than Facebook leads? Are TikTok leads mostly noise?
- Speed to lead. How fast does your team respond to new inbound leads from each campaign? Faster response times usually raise close rates and lower effective CPL.
- Average revenue per customer for each source. Does one channel bring in higher lifetime value clients or higher average order values in your e commerce store? That matters more than raw lead count.
LeadBadger helps by tagging every lead with its source, status, and outcome so you can see which PPC campaigns feed real revenue instead of just filling the pipeline.
How to use this in weekly reviews
In a weekly or biweekly marketing review, your team should be able to open one unified CPL dashboard and answer:
- Which channel has the best cost per valid lead right now.
- Which campaigns create leads that actually become customers, not just MQLs.
- Which ad sets or keywords drive profitable e commerce orders, not just traffic.
- Where you can cut spend without hurting revenue or booked appointments.
- Where you should scale budget because CPL and close rate are both strong.
With centralized CPL tracking, you can pause or scale campaigns with confidence instead of guessing based only on click based metrics or what the ad platforms want you to see.
Next steps
If you are running PPC campaigns on more than one platform and still bouncing between separate dashboards, you do not need another spreadsheet. You need a single source of truth.
That is exactly what LeadBadger is built to provide.
The next step is simple:
- Connect your Google, Meta, TikTok and other ad accounts to LeadBadger.
- Let LeadBadger tag and validate every lead, form fill, and e commerce contact in one place.
- Turn on the PPC tracking module so you can see cost per valid lead, cost per contact, and cost per key e commerce action for every channel and campaign.
From there, you use the dashboard to make clear decisions. Scale the campaigns that produce real customers, trim the ones that only produce noise, and treat your ad spend like an investment that you can measure, not a blind gamble spread across different tabs. LeadBadger does the heavy lifting in the background so your team can focus on strategy instead of chasing numbers across five different platforms.