From ad to contract: where people leak out
28 Aug 2026 MarketingAttribution
"The ads did not work." Said after three months of spending, with nobody knowing whether the problem was the ads or everything after them.
Measure the whole path, not its two ends
| Ratio | What it tells you | Alert line |
|---|---|---|
| Click ⇒ form | Ad and page quality | Below 2% |
| Form ⇒ contact within an hour | Team discipline | Below 80% |
| Contact ⇒ meeting | Targeting quality | Below 25% |
| Meeting ⇒ proposal | Qualification quality | Below 40% |
| Proposal ⇒ contract | Proposal and price quality | Below 25% |
Whichever ratio falls below its line is your problem. And it is not fixed by spending more at the top of the funnel, if the leak is at "contact ⇒ meeting", doubling budget doubles waste, not results.
The fastest available win: the first hour
Of all the above, the cheapest and highest-impact improvement is contact within an hour. The gap between replying within an hour and replying the next day shows up in meeting rate immediately, because whoever filled your form filled three others the same day.
Automate it: every new form ⇒ immediate assignment + a call task within an hour + a notification.
Attribution: store the source on the record, not in a report
The source must be stored as a field on the contact and the deal the moment it enters, not inferred later. Without that you will not know a year from now which campaign produced a contract.
And when you compute return, use closed contract value, not form count. A campaign yielding twenty forms and two contracts beats one yielding two hundred and one.
The quarterly question
"Which source gave us our longest-retained customers?", not the most numerous. A source bringing customers who renew for two years is worth three times one bringing customers who leave after one.