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Lead

An enquiry from someone who left their contact details. The most common number in a marketing report and the most definition-dependent: two lead counts on the same data can differ twofold.

Formula
number of project enquiries in the period
Unit
Count
Direction
Higher is better
Across periods
Adds up across periods
In KO
leads

A lead is an enquiry: someone left their contact details and became a row you can work with. A website form, a call, an email, a message in a chat app, a submission from another service — all of them are leads if the project decided to count them that way.

The word looks unambiguous; the number behind it is not. “How many leads” is not a fact but a consequence of a definition, and nearly every argument about channel efficiency is really an argument about the denominator.

What goes into the count

Leads = number of the project's enquiries for the period

Four decisions a project makes once and then lives with across every report:

DecisionWhat it changes
Does a newsletter signup countvolume rises, conversion to sale falls
Does a missed call countleads appear that were never answered
Does an existing customer countrepeat business mixes with new
Are repeat enquiries mergedone person is one row, or three

None of the answers is “correct”. What matters is different: until the definition is written down, two periods cannot be compared — changing the rule moves every derived number while moving neither spend nor revenue.

What the number does not show

Quality. An enquiry is the fact of a form being submitted, not the fact of interest. A bot, a competitor, a job seeker and a customer with a budget all enter the counter equally. A channel that is easy to click always produces more leads — and not always more money. The answer to that is the qualified lead, not a stricter filter at the door.

One person. Repeat enquiries from the same person are three rows or one, depending on whether they could be merged. Retargeting and email live on repeat contact and therefore look systematically better on lead count than they are.

Its own source. Some enquiries arrive with no trail: someone browsed on a phone and submitted from a work laptop; a blocker cut the counter; the click came from a chat app where tags do not survive forwarding. Those leads are in the total and missing from the channel row — which is exactly how cost per lead ends up overstated for every paid channel.

How KO computes it

In KO leads is an additive metric that counts the project’s lead entities, not form submission events. Three submissions by the same person merge into one lead wherever that could be established, so the report figure is usually lower than the event count on the site — that is double-counting removed, not data lost.

What a project counts as a lead is configured per project: sources, bot and test filters, merge rules. The report then shows what was excluded as its own rows — ”+ duplicates”, ”+ tests”, ”+ ads” — so that the gap between “arrived” and “counted” is never invisible.

The lead is the funnel’s zero point: qualified leads, key events and sales are all measured as shares of it, so any change to the lead definition shifts the entire funnel at once.

  • Qualified lead — an enquiry that reached sales.
  • CPL — what one enquiry cost.
  • Key event — the step after which a deal becomes likely.