Attribution: Cost Per Lead, Per Contact, Per Sale

Two institutes spend the same one lakh on Meta ads in a month. One team celebrates 400 leads at Rs 250 each; the other counts 18 enrolments and asks what each one cost. Both are looking at the same activity through different lenses, and only one lens is close to the truth. Building an attribution view — spend on one side, outcomes on the other — is less about clever software and more about recording two things consistently. Here is how to do it.

Three costs, three different questions

Cost per lead is spend divided by enquiries received. It tells you whether your targeting and creative are pulling people in, and nothing more. A source can produce gloriously cheap leads that never pick up the phone.

Cost per contact divides spend by leads your team actually reached and qualified. This is where junk reveals itself: a portal that delivers leads at Rs 80 but connects at one in ten is really charging Rs 800 per conversation.

Cost per sale — per enrolment, per booking, per order — divides spend by closures attributed to that source. It is the number that belongs in a management review, and the one almost nobody computes because spend and outcomes live in different spreadsheets.

The two records you must keep

First, spend: log what you spent, per source and campaign, per period. A monthly entry per channel is enough to start. Second, source on every lead: this must be automatic, because manual tagging decays within a week. When leads flow into your CRM directly from Meta forms, Google, IndiaMART, Justdial, your website or a webhook, each arrives stamped with its origin, and attribution stops depending on anyone's memory.

How the view comes together in ASH

ASH records marketing spend entries against sources and campaigns, and its marketing report divides that spend by what the pipeline shows: leads received, leads contacted and leads closed from each source. Because stage history is already in the CRM, cost per contact and cost per sale fall out of data you were capturing anyway. The report is only as good as your stages, though — if "closed" means different things to different people, the numbers will argue. It is worth designing your pipeline stages before leaning on attribution.

Reading the numbers without fooling yourself

• Never rank sources on cost per lead alone; it rewards volume, not value.
• Respect the lag. A long admissions or property cycle means this month's spend closes next quarter — compare cohorts, not calendar months.
• Distrust small numbers. Three sales from a source is an anecdote, not a rate.
• Treat the view as a question generator, not an autopilot. It shows where to investigate; shifting budget is still a judgement call, and no report can promise that next month repeats the last.

Attribution is unglamorous plumbing: a spend log, automatic source capture and honest stages. But once cost per lead, per contact and per sale sit side by side, budget conversations change from opinion to arithmetic. See the features overview for the lead capture sources ASH connects out of the box.