What Counts as a Lead

A lead is a person deciding whether to use your business. The calls, forms and messages are the evidence of that decision, not the lead itself.

One person, several contacts

Someone who calls on Monday, submits a form on Tuesday and calls again on Friday is one lead with four pieces of evidence — not four leads. Counting each contact separately would multiply your lead count and divide your cost per lead by the same accident.

When a second lead starts

A genuinely new enquiry — a new job, months later, a different problem — is a new lead. Ghost decides this from the content and timing of the contact, and falls back on a plain rule when it cannot tell: a closed enquiry, or a long enough gap, starts a new one.

What is not a lead

Suppliers, recruiters, wrong numbers and spam are contacts, not leads. Where Ghost can tell, they are excluded from lead counts and still visible as activity.

Platform leads

A lead form on an advertising platform creates a lead that the platform charged you for. A later call from that same person is more evidence for the same lead — not a new lead and not a new cost. See Duplicate Leads.