According to a report on Clickz that quotes statistics from IAB, online marketers spent close to $600 million in acquiring leads in the first half of 2006, using various lead generation techniques. Yet, there have been questions on the effectiveness of this spend, mainly because of the uncertainty in the quality of leads generated.
Therefore the IAB has come up with a quality ranking system for evaluating the quality of leads, to help marketers/ advertisers decide where to put their dollars. The quality ranking system proposed takes into account five aspects: origination of the lead, lead exclusivity, lead age, customer motivation and validation/ verfication of the lead manually and third parties.
One of the challenges of this kind of a scoring mechanism, unlike defining something such as page impressions, user sessions, ad formats etc. which the IAB is involved with, is that it cannot be applied as an absolute standard and has to take into account factors such as the industry and the advertiser’s objectives. The onus is therefore very much on the marketer to accurately define the relative weightage of the above parameters as applicable to that advertiser’s objective and come up with an appropriate score when trying to compare various lead generation sources.
From a lead generator’s perspective, I think very often the “problem” is that marketers [or lead buyers] themselves don’t have a concrete idea of the exact kind of leads that they are looking for. Since they run the risk of identifying their prospect base too narrowly, there is a tendency to be quite broad with their specifications of what is considered a lead — and then we get into this discussion of lead quality. Obviously, the tighter the definition, greater will be the premium for the lead.
In today’s “long tail” world, may be marketers are willing to make compromises there and hope to widen the net with the hope of converting a few more of those “low quality” leads…


Quality ranking system for leads from IAB - Read More...