The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Lead Generation Committee has published a practical set of guidelines to assist advertisers in measuring lead quality, “The Marketer and Agency Guide to Lead Quality.” It covers topics like determining which leads to contact first, what sales approach to take and where to focus ad dollars, as well as to inform advertisers’ negotiations on setting lead prices, according to Kate Kaye at ClickZ News.
IAB members met over several months to develop a system for scoring lead quality based on five specific factors:
- Lead Origination – the ad format used to capture user contact information
- Consumer Motivation – the reasons a user submitted personal data
- Lead Exclusivity – the number of advertisers the lead was sold to
- Lead Age – how much time has passed since the lead information was gathered
- Verification of Data – the validity of the data provided by the user
For B2B search marketers, qualifying leads should begin before they are even acquired, so they can avoid paying for low-quality leads in the first place, Patricia Hursh explained in a SearchDay article in January, “Don’t Click Here! Should You Pre-Qualify Clickers?.”
Hursh suggests using a combination of ad copy and targeting to pre-qualify visitors, with a continuous cycle of testing and measuring to get the best results.