The money leak nobody puts on the ad report
Your cost per lead looks fine in Ads Manager. What it hides is what happens after the form fill. A lead called within a minute still remembers your ad and is near their phone. The same lead called an hour later has scrolled past three competitors, and by the next morning has usually already spoken to one of them. So the real cost is not the lead price — it is the paid leads that quietly go cold because a person did not see the spreadsheet in time. On ad-driven businesses this is often one of the biggest leaks in the funnel, and it does not show up until the follow-up window has already closed.