You probably measure your company’s digital marketing performance by the number of leads it generates, but do you track how much you’re spending to capture these leads? With digital marketing costs climbing rapidly, assessing the cost per lead (CPL) is a critical performance measurement tool that you can use to help boost the success of your online marketing campaigns.
The business mantra of “build it, and they will come” tends to be a hit-or-miss proposition. For example, Ford Motor Co. released its vigorously marketed Edsel “car of the future” in late 1957. Sales were so bad that Ford lost the equivalent of $2 billion in today’s dollars within two years and cemented the Edsel’s reputation as the still-held biggest failure in American marketing. Failure so bad that, along with reference to being a car, Edsel is defined by Webster’s dictionary as a product that “fails to gain public acceptance despite high expectations, costly promotional efforts, etc.”
Digital marketing has made tremendous advancements since 1994, which featured the first-ever clickable web-ad banner, the alleged first-ever online sale, and the creation of the first-ever online market, NetMarket. That year, less than 0.4%—15 million people—of the global population was connected to the Internet. Today, over 70% of the world’s population—six billion people—has Internet access, marking a tremendous 29-year increase in the digital marketing customer base.