Cost per interview and cost per hire by campaign, not cost per click

What it does

Cost per click and cost per lead are easy to get and easy to misread. Take a simple example. Campaign A spends $300 and brings 30 leads at $10 each, but only 2 of them reach an interview, so each interview costs $150. Campaign B spends the same $300 on 15 leads at $20 each, and 6 of them interview, so each interview costs $50. Judged by cost per lead, A looks twice as good. Judged by what the business needs, B is three times better. Cutting B because its leads look expensive is one of the most common and costly mistakes in lead generation.

The formula is plain: the spend of a campaign divided by the number of its leads that reached an interview, and the same for hires. Three things must be in place. Spend per campaign, which the ad account already has. Each lead tied to a campaign, which needs UTM tags or click IDs on every ad. And a status for every lead, set by whoever handles the conversation. Match on the campaign ID rather than the name: in Google Ads the ValueTrack parameter {campaignid} can fill utm_id, and Meta's URL parameters support {{campaign.id}}. Names get edited; IDs do not.

Read the numbers with patience. Interviews and hires lag behind spend, so a campaign launched last week looks worse than it is. Compare equal periods, wait until most leads of that period have a status, and treat one or two hires as noise rather than a trend. Interviews are usually the better day-to-day metric because there are more of them, while hires confirm the direction over a month or a quarter. When a campaign has spend but no interviews for a sensible period, review its search terms, audiences and landing page before you pause it.

AdAce Ads calculates both numbers from the lead pipeline. The tracking script records UTM tags and click IDs with each lead, statuses come from the buttons in the client's Telegram topic or from the service, and leads are matched to campaigns by utm_id or utm_campaign. You get cost per interview and cost per hire for each campaign and for each candidate language, next to the spend from the connected Google and Meta accounts. The “All clients” screen shows lead totals per client, so an agency can see at a glance which accounts need attention.

Acting on the numbers is just as controlled. Moving budget from a campaign with expensive interviews to one with cheap interviews is a proposal: it shows the current budget read from the account, the new value and whether it fits the client's limits, and an approver confirms it with password and second factor. Undo restores the previous budget. A default monitor can also warn you when cost per lead rises 40% week over week, with a threshold you set, which is often an early sign that lead quality is slipping too.

Why it helps

• Budget decisions rest on interviews and hires, not on cheap clicks.
• Each campaign and each candidate language gets its own cost per interview.
• Agencies see lead totals for every client on one screen.
• Budget moves stay safe with approval, limits and undo.

How to set it up

1. Install the lead tracking script from “Analytics” → “Leads” on the client's site.
2. Add UTM tags to every ad, with the campaign ID in utm_id or utm_campaign.
3. Mark lead statuses in the client's Telegram topic or in the service.
4. After a few weeks, compare cost per interview and per hire by campaign in AdAce Ads.
5. Propose a budget change in favor of the campaign with the better cost per interview and send it for approval.

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