Offline Conversions
Part of Paid search reporting for sales teams
Separating lead volume from lead acceptance
Define sales acceptance, keep pending and duplicate requests visible, and calculate a lead acceptance rate the team can interpret.
Report submitted leads and sales-accepted leads as separate counts. Volume counts requests that reached intake; acceptance counts those the team judged suitable to pursue under an agreed rule. A request not yet assessed is pending, not rejected.
Lead Volume vs Lead Acceptance: Key Distinctions
- Lead Volume (Submitted)
- Number of requests received and recorded in intake system
- Lead Acceptance (Accepted)
- Number of submitted requests that meet predefined acceptance criteria
- Pending Requests
- Requests awaiting assessment under the written acceptance rule
- Rejected Requests
- Requests failing the acceptance rule, with documented reason
- Duplicates
- Identified as non-unique; linked to original request, not counted again
Write an acceptance rule sales can apply
Define the rule before interpreting campaign results. It may ask whether the requested service is offered, whether the job or delivery location is eligible, and whether the information is sufficient for follow-up. Record who decides and what happens when more information is needed. A lead can be accepted and still fail to become a sale.
Submission is an intake event; the other labels describe what happened to that request. Keep them distinct:
| Record | Reporting treatment |
|---|---|
| Submitted | Count once under the agreed duplicate rule. |
| Pending | Show separately until the fit check is complete. |
| Accepted | Include when the request meets the written rule. |
| Rejected | Record the reason the request fails the rule. |
| Duplicate | Link to the original request; do not count it as a new unique request. |
Keep an internal ID, submission date, assessment date, assessor and decision reason with the request. If a decision is reversed, retain its history and state which status the report uses. Date any change to the rule: a higher acceptance rate after a rule change may reflect the rule rather than better traffic.
Steps to Implement a Clear Lead Acceptance Rule
- Define Acceptance CriteriaInclude service availability, location eligibility, and sufficient contact details
- Assign Decision AuthoritySpecify who approves or rejects leads and what happens if information is missing
- Record MetadataTrack submission date, assessment date, assessor, and decision reason
- Maintain Historical RecordsPreserve change logs for rules and reversals; use current status in reporting
Calculate a rate with a visible denominator
For a fully assessed intake cohort, assessed acceptance rate = accepted unique requests ÷ (accepted plus rejected unique requests). Show pending requests alongside it. Do not put pending requests in the denominator and call the resulting lower rate poor quality. If duplicates cannot be identified reliably, label the rate provisional.
For illustration, 40 unique submissions might contain 20 accepted, 10 rejected and 10 pending requests. The assessed acceptance rate is 20 ÷ 30, or about 67%. It does not say the remaining 20 requests are unsuitable, and it is not a benchmark.
Label the date view. An intake-date view shows what arrived during a period, while an assessment-date view shows what the team decided during that period. A request can arrive in one week and be accepted in the next. Do not compare the two views as though they cover the same cohort.
Investigate the gap
Break rejections into reasons the business can act on. Wrong-service and out-of-area requests may point to the search coverage, the ad or the page promise. Missing information may point to intake design.
No current capacity describes an operating constraint; show it separately before judging whether the traffic matched the offer. Check the records before assigning a cause.
A conversion or form-submission total reported by a platform cannot establish that sales accepted those requests. Whatever stage labels a platform reports reflect the business rule and the outcomes successfully supplied to the platform; keep the internal acceptance register as the decision record.
End the review with pending requests, the main decision reasons and an owner for each follow-up. Revisit the intake cohort after pending cases are resolved before declaring a change in lead quality.
Pros and Cons of Reporting Leads by Acceptance Status
- ProsClear visibility into lead quality; enables accurate performance evaluation; supports targeted campaign optimisation
- ConsRequires consistent internal tracking; may delay reporting if assessments are slow; risk of misinterpretation if pending cases are excluded prematurely
