Close rate
Also called Win rate, Conversion rate to customer.
The share of leads that became customers. Read on leads whose outcome is known: won divided by won plus lost, with leads still open left out.
Why it matters
It is half of what a lead is worth. A kind of lead that closes twice as often is worth about twice as much, before deal size is even counted, and the differences between kinds of lead are usually larger than anyone expects.
What goes wrong
Two mistakes distort it. Counting open leads as lost makes every recent group look worse, because its leads have not had time to close. And a file of won deals only gives every group a close rate of one hundred per cent, which prices nothing.
Small groups mislead. Five wins from ten leads reads as fifty per cent and could as easily be twenty or eighty, which is why a close rate is only as good as the number of decided leads behind it.
What this product does about it
A kind of lead is priced only when at least 25 decided leads stand behind it, and its figures are then weighed by how many there are.
How to check it on your own account
Count your won and lost leads from last year, by source or by the answer to one form question. Divide won by won plus lost for each.
Next to this
Where this comes up
- Value-Based Bidding for Lead Generation - The Complete GuideA lower cost per lead looks good in a report. It means much less if those leads never become customers. How to estimate what a lead is worth, send it to Google Ads, and check whether the bids brought better business.
- Meta Value Optimization for Lead Generation - The Complete GuideHow to give Meta a value for every lead, which of its three optimization goals your account can actually use, why the value has to arrive once and on day zero, and how to tell whether Meta is now finding better customers or just more leads.
- Google Ads Value-Based Bidding Migration Guide: What to Expect When You SwitchA staged migration, in Google's own order. What resets the learning period, why it is measured in conversions and not days, and when you can honestly read the result.
- Google Ads Click ID Guide: Why Leads Lose Their GCLID and How to Fix ItA lead value Google cannot attribute cannot influence Smart Bidding. The six places a click ID disappears between the ad and the CRM, the one-line script that carries it into every form, the fixes in the order worth doing them, and how to measure click ID coverage rather than upload success.
- Journey-Aware Bidding: Google's Lead-Gen Bidding Upgrade, and What It Does Not DoJourney-aware bidding is an upgrade to Smart Bidding, not a new strategy. Target CPA campaigns learn from every stage between a form fill and a sale. What changes for lead-gen advertisers, what does not, and what to prepare.
In your trade
The industry pages that work this through for a kind of business.
The rest of this step
- Day-0 value
- Average deal size
- Expected value per lead
- Cohort
- Multiplier
- Value cap
- Profit on ad spend (POAS)
- Value spread
- Sample size confidence
- Flat feed
- Early gate
- Lead scoring vs lead valuation
- Propensity modelling
- Predicted lifetime value
- Conversion value rules
- New customer acquisition goal
- Conversion adjustments
- Recalibration
- Model drift
Measure this on your own data
The diagnostic reads a CRM export in your browser and reports your volume, your match rate and the spread between your leads against the thresholds in this glossary. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.