Lead Magnet Performance Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-376 judges content offers — guides, templates, calculators, webinars, audits — on the customers they produce rather than the downloads they collect. It follows each one from download to usable contact to qualified lead to customer, prices the sales time consumed along the way, and finds the offers that attract people who will never buy.

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

Downloads are not the point

Downloads are the number that gets reported and the least informative one available. An offer with four thousand downloads and one customer is not a successful lead magnet; it is a cost with an audience, and the sample includes exactly that.

The number that matters is downloads that became customers, and it varies between offers by a factor of fifty. Nothing about the download count predicts it.

The chain from download to customer

Each step loses people, and where the losses happen tells you what is wrong. Heavy losses at the usable-contact step mean the offer attracts people unwilling to identify themselves. Heavy losses at the worth-calling step mean it attracts the wrong people entirely. Losses at the last step are an ordinary sales problem.

Usable contacts

The most under-recorded field here. A download form that asks for an email produces a great many addresses, and a substantial share of them are made up, personal accounts used to avoid a sales call, or belong to students and competitors.

Under 40% usable is flagged. It is not always fixable and it is always worth knowing: the sample's procurement guide has a usable share under a third, which explains its customer count entirely.

One exception the tool cannot see: an email course delivers through the address, so everybody leaves a real one. The share means less there, and the sample notes it.

What an offer really costs

Production is spent once and spread across everything the offer goes on to produce, which is why a new offer carries a high cost per customer until it has run long enough to earn it back. That is honest rather than harsh — it is simply what the offer has cost so far.

Sales time is the hidden cost

A free download is not free. Somebody researches the lead, sends an email, makes a call, and does it again. At twenty minutes a lead, a magnet producing two thousand contactable leads a year consumes several weeks of a salesperson.

The tool prices it against qualified leads where you record them and against contactable ones where you do not, because unqualified leads are not worked for long. It is frequently the largest of the three costs, and it is the one that never appears in a marketing budget.

This is what produces the position producing customers and losing money doing it — a real outcome, and one nobody notices without adding the sales time up.

Top, middle and bottom

Record who each offer is for, and compare within the group rather than across it:

• Top — people with a problem who are not yet looking for a supplier. Enormous reach, very low conversion. That is the job, not a failure.
• Middle — comparing approaches. Fewer people, better intent.
• Bottom — choosing a supplier. Small numbers, high conversion, and usually the offers producing most of the customers.

Most businesses have far too many top-of-funnel offers and almost no bottom-of-funnel ones, because the top produces impressive download counts. Look at the customers column and the balance usually reverses.

Effort filters, and that is the feature

The pattern that shows up in almost every register of this kind: offers that take effort to consume produce more customers. A calculator you have to enter your own numbers into, a webinar costing an hour, an audit you have to book — each has a fraction of the downloads and several times the conversion.

The effort is doing the qualifying for you. Somebody who spends twenty minutes entering their costs into a calculator has a problem; somebody who clicked download on a guide may simply have been curious.

The format chart shows customers per thousand downloads, which is the fair comparison between a calculator with six hundred downloads and a guide with eight thousand.

Too young to judge

An offer needs at least one full sales cycle before its customer count means anything. Below the maturity threshold, the tool reports every figure and refuses to rank the offer or recommend anything.

This is the most common way good offers get killed. A report launched three months into a four-month sales cycle looks like a failure and has not yet had time to produce its first customer.

Retiring an offer

Keep retired offers in the register. They stop the same idea being rebuilt, they keep the format comparison honest, and the ones that failed are more instructive than the ones that worked.

An offer worth retiring is usually one of two things: mature, well-promoted, and producing no customers; or producing customers at more than they are worth once the sales time is counted. The decisions table names which.

What this cannot tell you

• Whether the attribution is right. A customer who downloaded three things is credited to whichever you assign, and the first one they took is often the one that mattered.
• Anything about influence. A guide that produces no customers directly may be why the calculator gets found.
• Whether a lead would have converted anyway.
• What the offer does for people who never buy — brand, reputation, and the recommendations that come from them.
• Whether the customers it produced are good customers. That needs a lifetime value calculation.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. The decisions table is the one for a content planning meeting: it names what each offer is doing and what to do about it, rather than presenting a league table of downloads.

Saving your work

Offers are held in this browser, on this computer, and stay there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every figure here is one you entered, and the most important — which customers came from which offer — is a judgement. The tool follows the chain and prices the time; it cannot tell you that an offer was the reason somebody bought.