There is a version of marketing reporting where the only thing that gets watched is cost per lead. It is the easiest number to move and the easiest number to fake, because a fake lead is by far the cheapest lead you can buy.

Last year I ran paid social for a security vendor and hit that wall. The dashboard said the campaigns were working. The sales team said the leads were rubbish. Both were true, which is the awkward part.

What we changed, and what we did not

Two things, in the space of three weeks. Email automation was added to qualify submissions before anyone spent time on them. The website forms were rebuilt with captcha. Ads, landing pages, budget and targeting stayed exactly the same.

That last part matters. If you change the creative at the same time as the forms, you learn nothing.

The comparison

Same budget either side. Roughly 150,000 impressions in both periods.

Before: 5,000 clicks at £0.34, 28 contacts, £59.50 per contact.

After: 4,000 clicks at £0.33, 8 contacts, £160.88 per contact.

Read that as a dashboard reader and it is a disaster. Twenty leads gone and the cost per lead tripled. Read it properly and the twenty that disappeared were the finding. A ratio of 28 contacts down to 8 after nothing but spam filtering tells you most of the original 28 were not people. They were form submissions from addresses that had never existed.

Why £160.88 is the better number

Because it sits inside the range that cybersecurity actually costs. The benchmarks I have seen for this market run from about £315 to £1,180 per qualified lead. £160.88 for a contact that a human can email and a salesperson can call is cheap. £59.50 for a mailbox that bounces is expensive at any price.

Nothing about the campaign got worse. The measurement got honest, and honesty looks like a decline on a slide.

How to tell which one you have

Open twenty of the leads and look at them. Free email domains on a B2B form. No company name, or a company name that is a keyboard mash. A phone number with the wrong digit count. Time on site near zero despite a completed form. A submission at 3am from a country you do not sell in.

If more than a quarter of your leads look like that, your cost per lead is a fiction and your sales team already knows. They are the ones absorbing the cost of it.

The uncomfortable bit

Fixing it makes you look worse to whoever reads the monthly report and better to whoever has to call the list. Those two audiences rarely sit in the same meeting, which is why the problem survives for years.

If your leads are cheap, find out what you are buying. A cheap lead is not a lead. It is a receipt for a click.