Cost per lead is the vanity metric of broker marketing. It is easy to calculate, easy to improve by buying cheaper data, and almost completely disconnected from whether your desk is making money.
The number that actually matters
What you need is cost per funded trader: total acquisition spend divided by the number of traders who deposited and remained active past their first thirty days. That last clause is what separates a real metric from a flattering one.
A list that costs $0.40 per record and converts at 0.3% to a funded, retained trader costs you $133 per funded trader. A list at $1.80 per record converting at 2.1% costs $86. The expensive list is 35% cheaper where it counts, and every broker who has run the comparison properly has found some version of this result.
Building the calculation
You need four inputs, and most desks can pull all four from their CRM in an afternoon:
- Total data spend for the cohort, including any replacement credits used.
- Connect rate — the share of records your dialler actually reached a human on. This is where bad data destroys economics before a single sales conversation happens.
- Connect-to-deposit rate — a function of your sales floor, not your data, and worth isolating for exactly that reason.
- Thirty-day retention — the filter that removes bonus-hunters from your numerator.
Why connect rate dominates
Run the sensitivity analysis and you will find connect rate has more leverage on cost per funded trader than any other input, because it sits at the top of the funnel and every downstream rate multiplies against it. Moving connect rate from 55% to 90% is mathematically equivalent to making your entire sales floor 64% more effective — and it is a great deal easier to achieve.
That is the whole argument for verified data, and it is an arithmetic argument rather than a marketing one. If a vendor cannot tell you the connect rate their last three clients measured, they are selling you a spreadsheet and hoping.