Meta spend (June)
$13,190
Graph API, Ford ad account
True cost / lead
$22.51
586 unique form leads
Leads captured
605
586 unique · 19 duplicates
What Ads Manager shows
$36.04
under-counts by 39%
The headline
Your real cost per lead is ~$22–26, not the $36 Meta's Ads Manager reports.
Meta only attributes 366 of June's Ford leads to its own campaigns, but the LeadGoGo inbox actually captured 605 (586 unique people). Judging performance off Ads Manager alone makes the campaigns look ~60% more expensive per lead than they really are.
Cost per lead by measurement source
Same $13,190 spend ÷ five different lead counts. Each system counts something slightly different — lower isn't automatically "better," it's about what's being measured.
The lead funnel — capture → CRM → sales
Where the 605 form submissions go. Two leaks worth fixing: duplicates, and leads that never reach the dealer CRM.
Two fixable leaks: ~19 duplicate submissions (3%), and ~70 leads (12%) captured by LeadGoGo never made it into the dealer CRM — that's sellable, already-paid-for pipeline lost to a sync gap, at $0 extra ad cost. And in this raw feed, 100% of leads sit "Unassigned / Intake" — confirm they're being routed to salespeople promptly.
Daily lead volume — the spend ramp worked
Leads per day. The mid-June budget scale-up (June is the year's peak at $13.2K) drove a step-change in volume.
~15× lift. June 1–15 averaged ~3 leads/day (38 total). From June 16 on — when spend scaled — it jumped to ~38/day (567 total). The paid-social ramp is directly responsible for the June lead surge.
Which forms produced the leads
| Lead form | Leads | Share |
|---|
"Autos Vega Ford 2026" and its Privacy-Policy variant account for 539 of 605 leads (89%). Consolidating the older duplicate forms would clean up reporting.
Insights & recommendations
- Report CPL as ~$22.51 (de-duped LeadGoGo capture) as "cost per lead generated," or $25.56 (dealer CRM) as "cost per lead delivered to sales." Both are honest; pick one and be consistent.
- Stop using Ads Manager's $36.04 for CPL. Meta's in-platform leadgen attribution under-counts actual form submissions by ~39% (366 vs 605) because of attribution windows — it makes your campaigns look worse than they are.
- Fix the LeadGoGo → CRM sync. ~70 paid leads/month (12%) aren't reaching the dealer CRM. Recovering them is free incremental pipeline.
- De-duplicate at intake. 19 leads (3%) are repeat submissions from the same phone/email — dedupe so reps don't double-work them and CPL isn't overstated.
- Route the "Unassigned/Intake" backlog. Every lead in this feed is unassigned — if that reflects reality (not just a pre-sync stage), $13K of paid leads is waiting to be worked.
- June proved the model. Spend scaled, leads scaled ~15×, and blended CPL held around $22–25 — efficiency didn't degrade as volume grew. Room to scale further.