Cost per lead is ad spend divided by real enquiries, meaning people who asked for a price. The most you can pay comes from your margin: on a €200 booking with 30% margin, keeping €20 profit leaves €40 for ads, and winning one enquiry in four means each can cost €10. At Irish Transfer, from June to August 2026, one website enquiry from Google Ads cost €16.15.
How do you work out cost per lead?
Divide what you spent on advertising by the number of real enquiries it brought. If you spent €1,000 in a month and received 50 enquiries, each one cost €20. For a chauffeur company, a lead is someone who asked for a price for a real trip, through a form, a call or a message.
The arithmetic takes a minute. The difficulty lies in what you count as an enquiry and what you compare the result with. A cost per lead of €20 means nothing until you know whether a €20 enquiry leaves you any money.
What counts as a lead?
Count people who asked for a price, and leave out everything that only looks like interest. A click is someone who arrived. A page view is someone who looked. A tap on a phone number may never become a call. If your Google Ads account reports any of these as conversions, your cost per lead will look cheap and your bank account will disagree.
Check the setup in three steps. Open the list of conversions in your account and read what each one measures. Send a real enquiry through your own form and confirm that exactly one conversion appears. Then compare the month’s conversions with the enquiries in your inbox or booking system. If the account says 80 and you can find 50, you are measuring something else. The conversion tracking guide goes through this properly.
Decide what to do about calls as well. If many of your customers ring, an account that counts only forms overstates your cost per lead, because the calls were paid for and left out. The call tracking guide explains how to count them.
What should one lead cost?
The most you can pay comes from your own margin, and nobody else’s benchmark can tell you that number. Start from one booking and work down.
- Average booking: €200 An example airport transfer, using your own average for the service you advertise.
- Margin of 30%: €60 left What remains after the driver, fuel, vehicle costs and any subcontractor.
- Keep €20 as profit: €40 for advertising The most one booking can cost in ads.
- Win 1 enquiry in 4: €10 per enquiry The most one enquiry can cost, because three others do not book.
The share you win changes the limit as much as anything else. In the same example, winning one enquiry in three raises the limit to about €13, and winning one in five lowers it to €8. So a faster reply can make an advert affordable without changing the advert at all. The guide on what a chauffeur booking is worth in paid search explains the method in more detail, and the ads limit calculator runs it on your figures.
Repeat customers can justify paying more than this, because a first booking from an ad may lead to several more with no ad behind them. Add that in only once you have measured how often it happens.
Why does cost per lead change?
When the figure moves, look for the cause before you change the budget. Four causes explain most of it.
- Season: competitors raise their bids in busy months, and enquiries can fall away in quiet ones, so compare the same months across two years where you can.
- Search terms: your ads may be showing for searches that never become enquiries, such as chauffeur jobs. The guide on negative keywords shows how to find and exclude them.
- The page: if fewer visitors fill in the form, each enquiry costs more even when clicks cost the same. See the guide on landing page conversion rate.
- The measurement: a broken form or a changed conversion setting can move the number overnight. Test the form before you read anything into a sudden jump.
How should you compare campaigns?
Look at cost per lead for each campaign, not only for the account. An airport campaign and a corporate campaign reach different people, win different shares and earn different amounts per booking. A €30 enquiry for a full-day corporate booking can be a far better purchase than a €10 enquiry for a short transfer.
For each campaign, write down four numbers once a month: spend, enquiries, bookings and the average booking value. Dividing spend by bookings gives you the ads behind each booking, which is the number to set against what a booking earns. A campaign with a higher cost per lead and a lower cost per booking deserves more budget, however it looks on the first report you open.
Wait for enough data before you act. A campaign with three enquiries in a month has told you very little, and one extra enquiry would change its cost per lead by a quarter. Give small campaigns a longer period to judge, or combine similar ones when you read the numbers.
What did it look like at Irish Transfer?
From June to August 2026, one website enquiry from Google Ads cost Irish Transfer €16.15. A conversion there is the website enquiry form only, so calls and messages are left out of that figure. Over the same period about €67 of ads stood behind each booking, against an average booking of €691 in 2026.
Spending more usually makes each extra enquiry more expensive, because the cheapest searches get used up first. In this case the cost fell as the budget grew, in a period when the website and the campaigns were both rebuilt. That is why a rising budget and a falling cost per lead belong to the work on the page and the campaigns together, and the budget on its own would not have done it.