Topic: How are you calculating your expected cost per lead and cost per lease?

How does your company or property come up with their expected ROI for your advertising?

Stephanie, great question. We don't pay as much attention to cost per lead, since leads can be unqualified, especially since many of the ILSes will take a true lead, and suggest other properties to that good lead, and those other communities (including mine) might not really fit the prospect's criteria. So leads can sometimes just be "busy work."
We focus on cost per lease. Overall cost per lease for a property is our total marketing spend for that asset divided by total leases during the same time period.
BUT when we're trying to focus on one source's effectiveness, say, our website, we take the total website cost and divided it by the leases that are identified as coming from that source. It gets trickier and trickier to determine the true internet source anymore, because someone may apply through our website, or their first contact with us may be through an ILS inquiry, and they may have seen our community on several different internet sites and possibly even driven by it!
I hope this was what you were asking for!