Lead Quality

The Lead quality page answers one question: was what your marketing brought in any good? It looks at everything that came in, sorts it, and shows what it cost.

The words on this page

• Inquiry: anyone who got in touch. One person's calls, texts, emails and forms about the same thing count as one inquiry, not five.
• Lead: an inquiry from someone who wanted work done. Every inquiry is a lead unless Ghost can show it isn't.
• Not a lead: an inquiry that was never going to be a job, like a sales pitch or a wrong number.
• Not verified: a lead Ghost couldn't check yet. Usually nobody ever spoke to them, or the conversation hasn't been read yet. These still count as leads.
• Bookable: a lead you could have done the work for. A lead is bookable unless there is a clear sign you couldn't serve them.
• Unbookable: a lead asking for something you don't do, or somewhere you don't go.

The three numbers at the top

• Bookable leads: how many leads you could have done the work for, and what share of all leads that is.
• Cost per bookable lead: your paid ad spend divided by the bookable leads that came from paid channels. Free channels are left out of both sides, so the number is what a good lead actually cost you.
• Wasted spend: money spent on inquiries that could never have become a job: ones that weren't leads, or that you couldn't serve. Leads nobody reached are not counted as waste, because that is a follow-up problem, not an ad problem.

Everything that came in

One bar shows every inquiry, split into bookable, unbookable, not verified and not a lead. The four parts always add up to the total. The bracket under the bar marks which parts are leads, so you can read the lead count straight off it.

Why not a lead

The reasons an inquiry wasn't a lead, biggest first:

• Existing customer: already a client, getting in touch about work you have or did.
• Sales or supplier: someone selling to you, a supplier, a recruiter or a job seeker.
• Charged again: the platform charged a second time for someone already enquiring.
• No new work asked for: a real conversation, but they didn't ask for any work.
• Spam: robocalls and junk.
• Wrong number: they meant to reach someone else.
• Calling for someone else: a tenant or family member arranging access for work someone else asked for.

Pick a reason to see which channels it came from. The channels are ranked by share, so a small channel full of spam stands out next to a big one with a little.

Why not bookable

• Service you don't offer: they asked for work you don't do.
• Outside your area: they wanted work where you don't go.

If you sent a quote, the lead always counts as bookable, whatever the conversation suggested. Ghost judges "service you don't offer" against the list of services in your profile, so a service missing from that list can be counted wrongly here.

By channel

One row per channel: its spend, inquiries, how many were bookable, not a lead or not verified, cost per bookable lead, and wasted spend.

• Platforms that charge per lead, like Local Services Ads, show what they charged you for. Open the row to see charged and not-charged inquiries side by side. Wasted spend there is exact: what you were charged for leads you could never book.
• Platforms that charge per click, like Google Ads and Meta, don't charge per lead, so their wasted spend is an average: spend divided by inquiries, times the ones you couldn't book.
• No spend this period means a channel you have paid for before, with no ad spend in these dates. Calls can still come through an old ad number or page.
• Small free channels are grouped as Other channels. Hover to see them.

Seeing the people behind a number

Every number opens the leads behind it in the Leads pipeline, with the same count. View inquiries and View leads next to each reason list open the full lists, and each lead is tagged with its reason.

How Ghost decides

Ghost reads the whole conversation, calls and messages together, and decides whether it was a request for work and whether you could have done it. Facts from your CRM come first: a quote sent or a job booked outranks anything read from the conversation. Personal details such as names, phone numbers and addresses are removed before anything is read.

The dates

Everything follows the date at the top of Ghost. Inquiries are counted by the day they started.