The four quiz-funnel metrics that matter (and the ones you can ignore)
Measure cost per qualified lead (not per lead), completion per screen to locate where people drop, the share of finishers who are actually viable, and time to first contact. Impressions, ad clicks and raw form counts say nothing about whether the funnel makes money — a funnel with more leads and worse qualification costs more, not less.
Most lead-gen dashboards show what is easy to count rather than what decides anything. These are the four numbers that actually move a local-services funnel.
1. Cost per qualified lead
Not cost per lead. The difference is not semantic: Meta instant forms win on cost per lead by 30-45% and still convert to a qualified opportunity 35-55% worse. Comparing funnels on cost per lead rewards precisely the one delivering more unusable people — the full argument here.
How to compute it: campaign spend divided by the leads that passed your filter, not by everyone who submitted something.
2. Completion per screen
Total completion tells you there is a problem; completion per screen tells you where. A drop concentrated on one step points to a badly worded or premature question; a drop spread evenly points to length. Those are two different fixes, and without the breakdown you cannot tell which one you have.
3. Share qualified
What percentage of the people who finish the quiz turn out to be viable. This is the metric that reveals whether your filter is calibrated: if nearly everyone passes, you are not filtering; if nearly nobody does, you are probably over-screening or the traffic is wrong.
It is also the number that translates the funnel into money, because every unviable contact carries a concrete cost in sales time.
4. Time to first contact
Minutes between a lead arriving and somebody writing to them. It is the most ignored metric and among the most profitable: reaching out within five minutes makes qualifying about 21 times more likely than at thirty minutes. If you do not record it, you cannot improve it.
The ones you can ignore
- Impressions and reach: they do not distinguish the right audience from noise.
- Ad clicks: useful for judging creative, irrelevant to whether the funnel closes business.
- Raw form counts: they go up precisely when you loosen the filter — that is, when things get worse.
- Landing-page time on site, once you measure quiz completion: it measures the same thing, worse.
A five-line dashboard
Monthly spend, qualified leads, cost per qualified lead, share qualified, and average time to first contact. If those five lines are moving the right way, the funnel is working — even if the total number of submissions went down.