The Pontiflex CPL Blog

Online lead generation has traditionally been plagued by problems. Over the years it has picked up quite a bad reputation.

The biggest issue is the lack of transparency. Traditionally, many advertisers have deployed campaigns through brokers and agencies which block visibility into campaign placements and as a result, advertisers are not able to optimize placement by mapping lead response-rates to their individual sources. And without metrics about the performance of leads from each source, fraud becomes impossible to detect.

Unscrupulous lead gen brokers vendors may use ‘opt out’ rather than ‘opt in’ methods to gather coregistrations. Worse, some brokers will sell pre-harvested email addresses as if they were legitimate coregistration leads. And incentivized marketing schemes such as free ipods, can drive leads which have no genuine interested in the advertiser’s offer. Without control over where their lead generation campaign will run, advertisers are at risk for fraud and they risk damaging their brand integrity by appearing on unscrupulous websites.

It’s easy to see why lead generation could use an extreme makeover. Not surprisingly, only 41% of companies believe they are effectively exploiting online lead generation to grow their business-to-consumer (B2C) customer base, a decrease from 44% in 2007 according to a study by e-consultancy and Clash Media.

Luckily, the tides are turning. Lead generation marketplaces such as Pontiflex have enabled advertisers to connect to publishers transparently and optimize campaigns by mapping leads to their sources.

With transparency a reality today in the online lead generation market, marketers can control exactly where their campaigns run. They can measure ROI across different sources and can optimize their spending across those sources. They can evaluate the quality of the leads generated by each source and tailor their communication strategy to the source of the lead, treating a lead from a sporting site differently than a lead from a finance site. And they can find contextually relevant environments in which to run their offers.

Transparency is indeed a beautiful thing.