Most NZ specialist firms can tell you what they spent on marketing last quarter. Far fewer can tell you what it earned them. That gap is the whole problem. If you can’t connect spend to settlements, every marketing decision becomes a guess — and guessing is expensive.
This is the practical version: the formula, the few numbers that actually matter, and the one thing that quietly breaks most firms’ ROI maths.
The formula, and why it’s only the start
Lead generation ROI is simple on paper: (revenue generated − cost of lead generation) ÷ cost of lead generation. Spend $5,000, win $25,000 in new business, and that’s a 400% return.
The trouble is the inputs. “Revenue generated” assumes you know which deals came from which marketing. “Cost” assumes you’ve counted everything — ad spend, tools, and the hours your team pours into chasing leads that were never going to buy. Get either wrong and the percentage is fiction.
The metrics that actually matter
You don’t need a dashboard with forty numbers. You need four:
- Cost per qualified lead — not per click or per form fill. What does one lead worth talking to actually cost?
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) — total spend divided by clients won. For a broker, one extra settlement usually covers months of it.
- Lifetime value (LTV) — a mortgage or insurance client is rarely a one-off. Measure ROI against the relationship, not the first transaction.
- Payback period — how long until a campaign pays for itself. This is the number that tells you whether you can afford to scale.
Track these and the picture stops being “marketing feels busy” and starts being “this channel returns $4 for every $1, so we do more of it.”
Why attribution is the hard part
Here’s what breaks the maths: a client who found you through an AI search answer, read two articles, then “came in on a referral” three weeks later gets logged as a referral. The channel that actually started the conversation gets no credit, so you underfund it.
That’s why we build honest, server-side tracking into every engagement. It survives ad blockers and long, offline sales cycles, so you can say with confidence which marketing produced which policy or settlement. Without it, you’re optimising on a story instead of the numbers.
Turning the numbers into decisions
Good ROI measurement isn’t a report you file. It’s a feedback loop: fund what returns, cut what doesn’t, reinvest the difference. It’s also where an owned system pulls ahead of rented attention — when the channel is yours, the same budget compounds instead of resetting to zero the day you stop paying.
If you want the measurement built in from day one, that’s how we run done-for-you lead generation. If you’d rather see where you stand first, start with a free Cited audit.