“Lead generation” sounds like something a B2B company with a sales department does. In practice, it’s what happens when a moving company’s phone rings from a Google ad. Here is the difference between bought and owned leads, how the form controls quality, and why response time matters more than most ad tweaks.
Real ads we have made for our clients
A lead is an inquiry from someone considering a purchase: a submitted form, a call, a booking. A click is not a lead, and neither is an impression or an “engaged user.” The distinction matters because Google and Meta optimize for what you measure. Measure clicks, and you get cheap clicks from people who never get in touch.
A lead isn’t a customer either. How many become customers depends on how fast you reply, whether the price was on the page, and whether the ad promised something the page didn’t deliver. You have to measure that number yourself, because it’s what decides how much you can afford to pay per lead.
Many service businesses start with portals like Mittanbud. It’s fast, but the lead isn’t yours alone.
| Bought leads (portals) | Owned leads (ads and your own site) | |
|---|---|---|
| Competition for the lead | Shared with several companies at once | The customer contacted only you |
| Price | Fixed per lead or subscription, regardless of quality | Varies with conversion rate and competition, and you see what each lead cost |
| Data and history | The portal owns it | You own the account and everything in it |
| Scaling | Limited by the portal’s volume in your area | Limited by search volume and budget |
| Getting started | Same day | A few days (tracking and landing page first) |
Portals can be a decent supplement in busy periods. As a foundation, they make you dependent on someone else’s price and volume. Owned leads come from Google searches for “service + city,” from Google Business Profile, from Meta ads with real content, and from retargeting people who visited the site without getting in touch. How to build it up step by step is in marketing for small businesses.
A form with just name and phone gives you the most leads and the most people who don’t answer when you call back. Every field you add gives you fewer leads, but the ones who come through have thought about it. The rule we use: ask for what you need to give a price or to prioritize, and no more.
The same goes for forms inside Meta (lead ads). They produce cheap leads because the fields are filled in automatically, but the quality is often lower than from your own landing page. Choose the higher-intent setting, where the customer has to confirm before submitting, and add one question that makes them think.
Forms, calls and bookings should be separate conversions, so you can see what comes from where. For calls, only those lasting longer than 30–60 seconds should count, otherwise wrong numbers count as leads. If you can also mark which leads became customers, in your CRM or a spreadsheet, and send that back to Google Ads, the account learns to find more of the good ones and fewer of the bad ones.
For Utvendig Renhold (facade and roof cleaning) we got 549 leads in 90 days (June–September 2026), at NOK 163 on average including searches for the brand name (around NOK 188 without). Across the nine regions, the price ranged from NOK 145 to 341 for the same service. That’s why we run one campaign per region and move budget to where leads are cheapest. Numbers from more industries, with caveats.
Max cost per lead = profit per new customer × share of leads that become customers. Work it out before you increase the budget. If you are under the ceiling, you can spend more. If you are over, something has to change: the page, the form, the response time or the keywords.
The customer has often sent the same request to several companies. Whoever calls back first has a head start that no ad tweak can buy. Before we switch on an account, we ask who owns the inbox and the phone, and what happens to a lead that comes in at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday. If no one has a good answer, that’s the first thing to fix. An automatic text or email confirming the inquiry was received and saying when you’ll call also helps.
Multiple locations? How we structure the campaigns. Service business? Channel choice industry by industry.
Three clients, before and after. The numbers come from our clients’ own ad accounts.
See also: Google Ads agency · Meta Ads agency · Performance marketing agency · What is UGC? · Google Ads agency Oslo
Send us your website and we’ll put together a concrete proposal for ads and a landing page for your business, the way it would look with your brand. You’ll get it by email within a couple of days, and it’s yours to keep either way.
Free · no lock-in contract · we never share your info
Would you rather talk directly? Book 30 minutes in the calendar → · victor@arcads.no
