Key takeaway: Most businesses that advertise online do not have a lead problem. They have a lead follow-up problem: enquiries answered late, poorly qualified, or never connected to sales. Faster responses, better lead forms and measuring cost per sale usually do more for conversions than a bigger advertising budget.
For most Nigerian businesses that advertise online, the conversation about results starts and ends with the adverts. Is the cost per lead too high? Should more budget move to Instagram, or to Google? Is the creative tired? These are fair questions. But in our work with businesses in real estate, finance, legal services and construction, we keep finding that the adverts are often doing their job. The leak is somewhere else: in the hours, and sometimes days, between an enquiry arriving and someone actually responding to it.
The research on this is old enough to be familiar and still uncomfortable. In a study published in the Harvard Business Review, researchers audited 2,241 US companies by sending each one a web enquiry and timing the response. Only 37% replied within an hour. Among those that replied within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours. Almost a quarter, 23%, never replied at all.
The same researchers analysed 1.25 million sales leads and found that firms that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even one hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or more. The study dates from 2011, before WhatsApp became the default way Nigerians contact a business. If anything, the expectation of an instant reply has only grown since.
That gap matters more every year, because leads are not getting cheaper. WordStream by LocaliQ, which tracks more than 16,000 Google Ads campaigns, put the average cost per lead at $70.11 in 2025, up from $66.69 the year before. Its Facebook benchmarks are lower but make the same point about what each enquiry is worth: real estate lead ads averaged $16.61 per lead, and legal services $18.17. Those are US figures and naira costs differ, but the principle travels. Every enquiry has already been paid for. Closer to home, Statista projects that spending on social media advertising in Nigeria will grow by about 10.7% a year to 2029, which means more businesses bidding for the same attention.
Picture how this plays out. A prospective buyer sees an advert for a new development in Lekki at 9pm, taps through and fills a short form. She also sends a WhatsApp message to two other developers she has been following. One of them replies within ten minutes, answers her question about the payment plan and books an inspection for Saturday. Your sales team sees her enquiry at 10am the next day. By then she has already decided whom to visit first, and your advert, which did exactly what it was meant to do, gets the blame.
Speed is only half of the problem. The other half is quality. When campaigns are judged on cost per lead, the cheapest leads look like the best ones, and the cheapest leads usually come from forms that ask for almost nothing. A name and a phone number submitted with one tap are easy to give and easy to forget. Sales teams then spend their days calling people who barely remember the advert, morale drops, and response times on genuine enquiries get slower still.
The fix is less about spending more and more about building a lead follow-up system around the money already being spent. The first part is speed. Every enquiry should reach a named person the moment it arrives, not sit in a shared inbox or on one person’s phone. A CRM can assign leads automatically by location, product or budget, alert the salesperson immediately, and pass the lead to someone else if nobody responds within an agreed time. Outside office hours, a WhatsApp or website assistant can answer common questions, collect details and book a call, so the conversation starts while the prospect is still interested.
The second part is qualification. Adding one or two questions to a lead form, such as budget, timeline or preferred location, will usually reduce the number of leads. It will also reduce the number of wasted calls, and give the salesperson something useful to open the conversation with. A shorter list of people who have told you what they want is worth more than a long list of names.
The third part is measurement. Instead of asking what each lead cost, ask what each sale cost. That means connecting advertising spend to sales records, so it is clear which campaigns produce buyers and which produce form-fillers. For many businesses, this one change reshapes the budget: the campaign with the most expensive leads sometimes turns out to deliver the cheapest sales.
Finally, the advertising platforms can be told who actually bought. Meta allows businesses to send sales outcomes from their CRM back to its advertising system and to optimise campaigns for leads that convert, rather than for the number of forms submitted. Meta’s own documentation is careful to say this “may yield higher quality leads that are more likely to convert”, and results vary, but the logic is sound. A system that only knows who filled a form will find more people who fill forms. One that knows who paid will look for more people who pay.
None of this requires a bigger advertising budget. It requires treating the enquiry as the start of the sale rather than the end of the marketing. Businesses that respond quickly, ask better questions and measure the right numbers often find that the adverts they thought were underperforming were working all along.
At Evaluate Media, we help businesses in Lagos and across Nigeria connect their advertising to their sales process, from digital advertising strategy to CRM setup and lead follow-up. If you would like us to look at where your leads are going, book a free 30-minute marketing review with our team.
Collins Oforgu is the CEO of Evaluate Media, a marketing and media agency in Lagos. He has spent more than ten years in sales, marketing and media in Nigeria.