A drop in cost per enquiry is usually welcome. Before you give the campaign more budget, check how many of those enquiries your team could actually quote. For a service business with a small team, a cheaper enquiry can still take just as long to answer, check and follow up.
We saw this while working with a UK secured-loan broker. WhatConverts tracked 53 Google Ads enquiries in August 2026 and 99 in September. The broker marked 42 as quotable in each month. That’s about 79% of the tracked enquiries in August and 42% in September. The media cost per enquiry fell, and the team had the same number of opportunities it considered suitable for a quote. Funding and revenue come later in the process. Secured-loan case study and measurement notes
Agree what your team would quote
Imagine you run a commercial cleaning business serving Greater Manchester. You could count every call that asks about cleaning. Your team would probably apply a few more checks before sending someone out for a site visit. They’d want to know whether it’s a commercial job, whether the premises are in an area you cover and whether the work fits your schedule. Agree those criteria with the people who answer the calls. A short definition they can apply consistently is worth more than a detailed scoring system nobody uses.
Keep a separate status for enquiries still waiting to be reviewed. A busy week can leave good enquiries sitting in the inbox. If you roll those into the unsuitable group, you can end up changing your ads to solve a backlog at your end.
Compare the same stages for both months
Take the leads received in each period and give them the same amount of time to reach a decision. Compare ad spend and outcomes for the same source, and track three numbers together.
- Enquiries received. Count the calls and forms your team received.
- Quotable enquiries. Count how many passed the criteria your team agreed.
- Media cost per quotable enquiry. Divide the matched ad spend by the number marked quotable.
Put quotes sent and jobs won alongside those numbers if you can match them to the original enquiry. That gives you somewhere to look when enquiries are suitable and sales still slow down. If the figures in your CRM and ad account differ, start with a handful of calls or forms you can trace through both. Follow each record from the original enquiry to its latest status before trying to reconcile the whole report. Guide to measuring what happens after an enquiry
Find out where the extra enquiries came from
Before moving budget, ask the person handling the enquiries to go through a few examples with whoever runs the ads. If most of the extra calls are for work you don’t do, look at the searches and the offer on the page. If the examples fit but are still waiting for a response, sort out who’s following them up and when. Both problems can produce the same line on a report, but they need different fixes.
At your next review, put the cost per enquiry beside the number your team could quote and the media cost of getting one of those opportunities. If the extra volume is useful and the team can handle it, you have a better reason to spend more. If the number of quotable enquiries has stayed flat, investigate where the extra calls and forms came from before paying for more of them.
