- A lead is an identifiable contact who has shown interest: a form, a call, a booked meeting.
- Platforms count submitted forms; the CRM counts unique contacts. The gap comes from duplicates and invalid entries.
- Lead volume says nothing without the sales close-rate that follows it.
Definition
A lead is a contact who has left their details or reached out, in a setting that allows sales follow-up.
Worked example
A LinkedIn campaign reports 80 leads for the month. After deduplication and removal of invalid addresses, the CRM records 68. Of those 68, the team qualifies 22 as genuinely relevant. The cost per lead shown by the platform is therefore optimistic by a factor of three against the cost per qualified lead.
Orders of magnitude
A 10% to 20% gap between the leads a platform claims and those recorded in the CRM is normal. Beyond that, check deduplication and form quality.
The most common mistakes
- Counting leads without deduplicating. One contact filling in two forms counts twice on the platform side.
- Treating every lead as equivalent. A one-click pre-filled form does not carry the value of a long form filled in by hand.
- Steering campaigns on volume rather than qualification. It is the surest way to optimise towards contacts with no intent.
Where to find the metric
In LinkedIn Ads, the Leads column, fed by Lead Gen Forms. In Meta, on lead generation campaigns. In Google Ads, through the conversion action matching the form. The reference figure remains the one in the CRM.
Frequently asked questions
The Adwise team connects Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, GA4 and Search Console so agencies and freelancers can run their campaigns from a single place.