Getting leads
Almost every business that arrives here can quote a cost per lead. Almost none can quote a cost per customer. Put the two side by side and the cheapest source is regularly the worst one, and the channel that looked expensive turns out to be the only one producing signed work. A lead is not a result. The result is the customer, and that is the number this page is built around.
What we report on
Certified across the platforms we buy on. 150+ businesses, 7 years.
Paid ads: pay for a lead, not for a month.
1First, we fix the tracking.
If the account cannot see a lead, it cannot find you more of them.
Tap a step to see it again.
Fit
Worth reading before the rest of the page. If the right-hand column describes you, the honest answer is that this is not the service to buy.
This is for you if
This is not for you if
If you are on the right-hand side, say so in the form anyway. We will tell you what we would do in your position, which costs you nothing and costs us fifteen minutes.
Industries with their own page, each with what goes wrong in search, paid and email for that trade.
The cheapest lead source is usually the worst one. Without outcomes fed back from the CRM, the channel that looks best in the dashboard is often the one losing money, and every optimisation decision gets made in that direction.
Attribution stops at the first form. A business that cannot say which channel produced a signed contract nine months later cannot budget, and is guessing every quarter.
The gap between an enquiry arriving and somebody responding is frequently the largest single lever in the account, and it usually sits outside marketing entirely. It gets measured here because it changes what the marketing is worth.
An agency paid on lead volume will produce lead volume. Point the target at qualified enquiries and the tactics change on day one.
One Google Ads account measured here produced 2,410 conversions at £19.21 each from £46.3K of spend. That is a good number on a dashboard. It says nothing about how many of those conversions became customers, because the dashboard stops at the form and the customers are decided in the fortnight after it.
That is the problem with lead generation as it is usually sold. The report ends exactly where the interesting part starts.
Three things happen in an account optimised on cost per lead, and none of them is the platform’s fault.
The platform finds cheaper leads by finding worse ones. Ask for form fills and smart bidding buys form fills, including from people who will never answer the phone. The cost per lead falls and the cost per customer rises, and only one of those is on the report.
The source is lost at the form. An enquiry arrives in an inbox with no record of the search, the campaign or the page that produced it. Nine months later the contract is signed and nobody can say which channel earned it, so next quarter’s budget is set on instinct.
Nobody times the reply. The gap between the enquiry and the first human response is regularly the biggest lever in the account, and it sits outside marketing, so nobody measures it. A lead answered the next morning is a lead somebody else already spoke to.
So the work here starts with a definition of qualified, written down and agreed, and a line in the CRM for where each enquiry came from. Everything else is built on those two.
What is a qualified enquiry, in one sentence you and your sales team both agree with?
Where does an enquiry go the moment it arrives, and who sees it first?
How long, on average, before a person replies?
Which channel produced last quarter’s signed customers?
What is one customer worth, so the arithmetic on cost per lead can be done at all?
If any of those has no answer, that is the first week’s work, and it costs less than the next month of spend.
If enquiries already wait a day for a reply, more enquiries make the queue longer. If the sales process converts one in twenty, the fix is the process, and paying for more traffic at the front of it is paying to disappoint more people. Both of those get said on the review, and both have ended an engagement before it started.
Lead generation also cannot buy you a list. Purchased contacts and shared leads are not used here, and in most of the markets worth reaching they are illegal to email anyway.
Count customers, not forms. Everything upstream changes once the target does.
Not a list of capabilities. This is the work that happens on your account, and you can hold the monthly report against it.
Before any spend. What counts, what does not, and who decides. Without it, every later conversation about performance is two people using one word to mean different things.
Enquiries flowing into the CRM with source, campaign and landing page attached, and outcomes flowing back so the channel report can show signed business rather than submissions.
Paid search, organic, email and where relevant paid social, sized against your economics rather than against what is easiest to sell. Some of these get ruled out on the review.
Built for the enquiry rather than for the brand. Field count, question order and what happens on submit all change the completion rate, and all of it is measured.
Automated first response, then a real nurture sequence for the enquiries that are not ready. Lead generation loses more in the fortnight after the form than it does before it.
Enquiries, qualified rate, cost per qualified enquiry, and where your data allows it, cost per customer by channel.
How long it takes
Nobody can tell you in advance what your account will do. What can be said in advance is what will have happened by when.
Qualified lead defined and agreed, CRM connected, tracking verified. Baseline recorded, including current response time.
The channel with the shortest path to a measurable enquiry goes first, usually paid search. Landing pages and follow-up are built alongside it rather than after.
The supporting channel added, nurture sequences live for enquiries that did not convert immediately. Qualified rate becomes readable around here.
Outcomes flowing back from the CRM, budget moved toward what produces signed business. This is the point at which the cheapest lead source often gets switched off.
A list of tasks is not a result. These are the things that should be different in the business, and each one is measurable.
An agency paid for leads will produce leads. Define the target as qualified enquiries and the tactics change on day one. On paid channels that is the pricing model: per qualified lead, and no charge for one that misses the bar.
It sits outside marketing and it is regularly the biggest lever in the account. Reporting it makes it visible, and visible problems get fixed.
When the constraint is capacity rather than demand, more budget makes things worse. Carrying a financial guarantee means saying so is in this agency's interest too.
The number of channels being run and the state of the measurement you already have. A business with a working CRM and clean attribution needs far less setup than one where enquiries arrive in an inbox. On paid channels there is no retainer: you pay per qualified lead, against criteria agreed in writing before launch.
No lock-in, month to month. It gets three months before it is judged, because a sales cycle needs that long to show up. That is advice, not a contract.
Miss the written target inside 90 days and you get the fee back plus $1,000, on the standard conditions. On paid channels the terms are simpler still: a lead that misses the criteria you agreed is not billed. And if response time or sales capacity is the constraint rather than enquiry volume, that gets said on the review and the engagement is declined, because more enquiries would only make a queue longer.
Meta
2,631
leads at £2.68 each
The best-performing ad set reached £0.77 per lead.
Google Ads
2,410
conversions at £19.21 each
£46.3K spend at a £0.57 average cost per click.
Real accounts, anonymised by client agreement. Currency as recorded in the account. Movement varies by market, budget and starting position.
Proof
Every figure below is legible in the screenshot beside it, and every card says what the numbers do not establish.
Google Ads, lead generationMedia buying
2.41Kconversions
Meta, lead generationMedia buying
£2.68cost per lead
A 50% increase in organic traffic, keyword rankings or direct enquiries within 90 days of the engagement starting.
On camera
Four clients, four industries, one thing in common: the number moved and they said so on camera.
It is the best long-term investment we have made in the company, full stop.
Ahmed · Business owner · SEO
The cost per lead from organic is a fraction of what we pay on ads, and that math gets better every month.
Sandra · Founder · SEO
People can book a table without calling during the dinner rush. My host actually thanked me.
Aaliyah · Restaurant owner · Website
These tech geeks know the Facebook analytics and the data and the pixels and all that stuff that makes a musician’s head explode.
David · The Wankers · Social ads
Reviews
4.9 out of 5 from 22 published reviews
I have been in business long enough to know that every agency has a presentation about why they are different. That part doesn't interest me. What mattered to us was whether they understood our market and whether they would actually do the work after the meeting was over. So far, they've been practical, responsive and consistent. We discuss priorities, the team works on them, and we review what was done. I prefer that kind of relationship.
I am probably not the easiest person to build a landing page for because I change my mind constantly. First I wanted it minimal. Then more colour. Then less colour. Then I hated the headline. Then I wanted the old headline back. 😂 What I liked was that the team didn't get irritated or disappear every time I asked for another round of changes. We kept working through it until it finally felt like us.
My son said we needed SEO. I said fine, but I didn't want to hear about it every week. Mavix sorted the important stuff and kept it simple.
Photos are illustrative. Every quote is the client's own words.
Questions
Comparing SEO agencies? We report enquiries and cost per enquiry from month one, split branded from non-branded, and say plainly what we will not promise.
You already paid for the lead. Follow-up, quote chasers, win-backs and repeat orders stop you paying for the same customer twice. Results guaranteed in writing.
Paid search on Google and Microsoft Ads, judged on cost per customer rather than cost per click. Wasted spend found first, tracking fixed before optimising.
Work it out yourself
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A 50% increase in 90 days, or you get a refund plus $1,000. Yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
