By Guest Blogger: James Atherton

Whilst it never quite descends into the levels of violence seen throughout Ennio Morricone’s film, using the term ‘lead generation’ today in front of advertisers, agency workers or even your average Joe on the street can lead to questioning looks.

How has this happened? Too many times lead generation campaigns have pushed a huge volume of leads of questionable quality, leaving a bad taste in advertisers’ mouths that is only recently beginning to be turned around. Campaigns were based around heavily incentivised creative and featured on poor quality sites resulting in data that bore little or no relevance to the target demographics of the advertiser.

However, as so often happens in online advertising, the landscape has changed. Publishers are placing the emphasis on quality leads, achieved through transparency, accountability and technological developments. Leads can be dependent upon the fulfilment upon a number of criteria, whittling down the number of accepted leads to include only those of real value for the advertiser. Remnant inventory is also leveraged to enable leads to be captured from IASH accredited websites that fit with the target demographic – any incentive to opt in purely for a prize or free offer is also removed. For a mobile phone operator, the criteria could be as follows (with criteria up to 20 questions long not uncommon):

Are you currently nearing the end of your contract: Yes
Would you be willing to consider a shift to a different operator/network: Yes

Postal/ZIP codes and email addresses are verified, phone numbers qualified by number of digits and names scanned for a set list of false identities – Mickey Mouse etc. Only after these criteria have been met will the lead then by cross-checked against the advertiser’s database in real time to determine if that contact is already in their system. Once the lead is verified, most publishers will then send a solus email to the confirmed lead, instantly targeting them at their warmest. Companies with the capacity to do so can also feed these leads directly through to their call centres, vastly increasing conversion rates for products with a high order value or long-term commitment.

Through the development of tracking technologies, the value of leads can also be made highly accountable – in a world where ROI is pushed increasingly to the fore, this is invaluable. To give an automotive example, an individual lead’s journey can be tracked from its inception through to a test drive, and then through to final sale. A cruise brochure sent as PDF can be tracked back to the booking of the actual cruise. What this allows is for the advertiser to see the actual ROI of the leads that are being generated, based upon the price of the lead itself, any additional efforts needed to complete the process through to final sale, and the value of the sale itself.

As an affirmation of the work that has been carried out by publishers to rebuild the reputation of lead generation, these changes have been reiterated by guiding voices such as the IAB, who in November 2008 launched a lead generation taskforce to educate advertisers on the benefits of the channel. The recent result of this is a series of white papers aiming at illustrating its benefits to the very marketers who have been questioning its value until so recently.

Despite all of this, those involved in lead generation cannot afford to become complacent – even now, just by Googling the term ‘lead generation’ you are greeted with a sea of companies offering their services, not all of whom seem to be of a sufficient quality to aid in the channel’s renaissance. By adhering to the core values that have seen lead generation move from a misconceived specialism to a regular presence on media plans, we can continue the move from ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’ and move towards another Spaghetti Western, where we can all clutch ‘A Fistfull Of Dollars’.

By Guest Blogger: James Atherton