Average Cost Per Lead on Facebook Ads

CPL stands for cost per lead. CPL is calculated on Facebook by dividing your spend by leads generated in campaigns using the lead generation campaign objective.

For example, if your spend was $100 and you generated 12 leads for that $100, your CPL was $8.33 ($100/12=$8.33).

If you’re running a campaign using the conversion objective, driving Facebook ad traffic to your own landing page with a lead form, leads generated from this campaign won’t display in Ads Manager as “leads” but as conversions, or results.

With the lead generation campaign objective, your Facebook ads call-to-action when clicked will generate a pop-up lead form right on Facebook. Only through this type of campaign will you see in Ads Manager “leads” as the result and therefore cost per lead.

A good cost per lead on Facebook is relative to your sales funnel and can only be determined by measuring the throughput of your leads to customers.

And since every company will sell different products and services at different prices with different lead conversion rates, a “good” cost per lead will be different for everyone.

This calculation may be difficult to always have on hand for some advertisers, so many set a conservative ROAS goal they estimate will meet their break even point. To have the ROAS metric function in your Facebook ads manager, you must be pulling in revenue through some form of an integration with Facebook ads and your ecommerce platform.

You can also use the chart above to see what the average Facebook cost per lead is and compare it to yours, or you can join our Facebook community where you can ask folks in your same industry what their CPL is to get a baseline and tips on how to reduce your cost per lead.

Since the lead event is the final event in your Facebook ad funnel, the cause of a high cost per lead on Facebook ads could be a combination of several factors that go into determining the cost of Facebook ads.

Before looking to find out why your cost per lead is high, first check if your Facebook CPMs are high, because a high CPM will naturally lead to a high CPL.

Here are some additional things that can cause a high cost per lead on Facebook:

• audiences less than optimal for the product or service you’re advertising for
• lead form is asking too many questions causing people to bounce before they fill it out
• not using the lead generation campaign objective with Facebook’s lead form

One of the best ways to lower your cost per lead is to use the lead generation objective with Facebook’s built in lead forms.

This is important for several reasons:

1. When people click your lead gen ad, a lead form instantly pops up directly in Facebook so the user doesn’t have to leave Facebook and wait for a page to load
2. Facebook can auto fill some of the form fields it already has the information for removing friction from a lead form
3. Facebook can optimize your ad delivery to prioritize people its algorithm thinks is most likely to fill out a lead form

However, even though this will drop your cost per lead, it is well known that you will generate a far greater number of lower quality leads. It is important to measure lead quality and whether someone is a good fit or bad fit and then you can measure the cost per good fit lead.

And once you’re able to measure cost per good fit lead, you can test whether lead generation campaigns have a better or worse cost per good fit lead compared to conversion campaigns sending traffic to your website.