By Tora Buchardt, Performance Director at Equality Media + Marketing
Let’s be real: if you are still optimising campaigns on click-through rates and cost-per-lead alone, you are not managing marketing. You are managing a fantasy.
Clicks don’t pay the bills. Form fills don’t sign contracts. Yet across too many industries, marketers are still making spend decisions based on what happens before the sale, not after it. It’s like thinking you’re successful at dating because you get matches on Hinge, ignoring the fact you’re not having any conversations or going on any dates.
The appeal of clicks is obvious. We all love a dashboard with green arrows pointing up. The problem is that most dashboards stop at the first sign of interest. Once a lead hits the CRM, the marketing data trail often goes cold.
Not all leads are created equal. In property marketing, where Equality Media + Marketing works with some of Australia’s most ambitious developers and builders, we have seen the cost of this blind spot first-hand. Two leads from the same channel at the same cost can have very different outcomes. One might move quickly to contract, the other might never return a call. Without post-click data, you treat them the same, and that means continuing to fund the wrong channels, audiences or creative.
Here’s where the real power lies: when you connect CRM and sales data back to media performance, the picture changes dramatically. You stop optimising for interest and start optimising for impact. You can direct budget to the places where it delivers actual customers, not just curious browsers. And you can make better, faster decisions because you know which tactics are truly paying off.
This shift is not just about better reporting. It’s about becoming a revenue engine rather than a lead factory.
If that sounds obvious, the reality is many marketers are still behind. Sectors like e-commerce have been closing the loop for years. If a product ad is not generating sales, it is paused instantly. But in high-value, long-tail categories like property, professional services or B2B, the marketing-to-sales handover is still treated as a hard stop. Once the lead is in sales’ hands, marketing steps away. That mindset is costly.
The leaders are taking a different approach. The brands ahead of the curve treat the sales journey as one connected process. They track every lead from first click to final transaction, score leads based on their likelihood to convert, and adjust their media spend in response to real revenue data, not just lead volume.
In one property campaign we ran in 2024, this approach overturned assumptions. The channel that looked average on click metrics and drove our second-highest cost-per-lead turned out to deliver a stronger contactable and appointment rate, as well as the highest sale rate, between 2-8x higher than every other source. If we had simply relied on vanity metrics of clicks or even the cost-per-lead, we would have culled this channel early on.
So, how do you make the shift? Start by mapping the customer journey from impression to sale and pinpoint where the data drops off. Integrate your ad platforms, CRM and analytics so the flow of information does not stop at the lead stage. Then, change your scoreboard. Measure cost per sale or revenue per channel rather than cost per lead. If the purchase cycle is longer then measure and optimise to a cost per appointment or cost per quote. And make sure both marketing and sales teams work from the same set of numbers.
The bottom line is simple. Clicks may make us feel good, but conversions keep us in business. If you want your marketing to survive the next budget cut, stop celebrating the top of the funnel and start interrogating the bottom. The brands that can prove every dollar is pulling its weight will not just win more budget, they will win more business. Everything else is just noise.