Here is a checklist with 10 signs that shows your business needs an automatic web lead distribution system. If you are new to the internet lead generation business or a recently established the lead company and you are not using a lead distribution software system, compare your lead gen and delivery operations with this checklist. You might be surprised what opportunities (that will help you in scaling up the business) are being missed.

If you are already using some sort of lead management system and you still some of the problems described in the checklist, then it may be good time to reevaluate your software solution and match with your business requirements.

#1 Too much time spent in emailing leads: Are you spending too much time in emailing the leads received from your lead generation websites? When you started the business, probably it was good idea to focus on lead gen and business development. You could have emailed the few leads received to a handful of lead buyers. But, if you are following the same process, then you are not growing your business.

#2 Leads fall through the cracks: Are you missing the leads and the captured leads never reach the intended customers? Every lead missed is money wasted – in terms of lead generation efforts and cost. When you go on vacation, what happens to the leads? Either you need to subordinate to take care or your customers might slip away from you.

#3 Wasting time in re-formatting Emails to Customers: Even if you are dealing in a specific vertical such as Education Leads or Insurance Leads, each of your customer may be needing the lead data emailed to them in a specific format. If you sign-up more customers, more pronounced will be this problem. Your lead distribution and management system will support multiple email layouts and format to meet each customer’s requirement.

#4 Have to ignore potential buyers since they need automated Lead Delivery: I am sure that every has to avoid signing up one or two clients for some important reason. However, ignoring customers for want of an automated lead delivery management system will fatal to the business. Sophisticated / savvy / large customers will demand more automation features.

#5 Have more than a handful of websites or leads generated: If you have a more than a few websites, then managing the capture and distribution process is tedious. Also, measuring the performance of each website is essential to optimize your leadgen efforts. Even if you have one or two lead capture websites, if the volume of leads generated is high, then you will face the same issues.

#6 Using Google / Yahoo / Bing PPC for leadgen: Are you using PPC (pay per click) programs with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing AdCenter to drive web traffic and generate leads? If so, you cannot live without a solid lead management system to manage and analyze the leads captured on your PPC landing pages. Don’t waste your inbound marketing efforts without fully monetizing.

#7 Don’t find enough time for Lead Generation: Are you spending too much time on your operations management? You must be focusing on traffic generation strategies and activities. Another important aspect needing most of your time is the business development and enrolling more customers. Deployment of a lead company operations management system can take care of capture, delivery and tracking.

#8 Lead Buyers complain about delay in lead delivery: Have you heard any complaints from your lead clients that leads are not reaching them on time? If you promise real time leads, the leads should be delivered in real time. It means that the data should be delivered within a few minutes, not after 30 minutes. Remember, the first responders have the advantage of converting the prospect to a customer.

#9 Losing Revenue: Are you leaving money on the table? If you don’t automate the distribution process, you may not route the prospects to all buyers. If you are promising multiple quotes for the prospects, you need to deliver the lead info to multiple customers. For example, if you are generating insurance or mortgage leads and the routing is based on geography (zip code or state), imaging how error prone the delivery routing process will be.

#10 Spending time on analyzing leads: Do you know where the leads are coming from and how these are distributed? What is your profitable lead source? Unless you know answers for these questions you cannot optimize your investment and generate revenue. If you are not using a good lead distribution database system which will provide instant answers on questions such as these, you will be wasting time in trying to get a grip of the business operations.

If you think that even one or two signs are visible, then it is time to take an in-depth look at your business operations / practices and analyze if an automatic lead distribution system can help you.

Whether you are a veteran in the internet lead generation and distribution business or just a rookie, driving affiliate traffic via CPA Ad Networks should be a key part of your leadgen strategy.  You may take a look at my earlier post How to Use CPA Ad Networks for Lead Generation and reduce dependence on Google Adwords PPC, if you are yet to get into the game!

Lead Quality is Key

The success of the leadgen business depends on the lead quality and resulting ability to retain the lead buyers as customers in the long term. If you are using your own traffic generation modes such as SEO, Google Adwords, Facebook Advertising, Banner Ads, etc., you will have pretty good control over the nature of traffic and resulting lead quality.

When you are using CPA Ad Networks, essentially you are outsourcing the traffic generation. In such a condition, you have very little control over the quality of the web traffic driven to your landing pages. As a result the lead quality may suffer, which will affect your business in the long term. This holds good even if you are using the leads generated for your own purpose (and not reselling leads).

Here are some key factors to be taken care of (while using CPA Networks) in the lead capture process, which will help you ensure lead quality to a great extent.

• Research, test and choose a right Ad Network in the first place.
• Design and test Landing Pages for proper / good conversion. Conversion rate alone should not be criteria.
• Track the leads by source. If you are using multiple networks, you should be able to analyze the performance of each network based on lead quality.
• If required, you may use multiple landing pages depending on your offer and ad network used.
• Depending on the quality of leads delivered, stop  / start using those ad networks. Typically, ad networks provide a 10% cushion for bad / invalid leads. However, this may not be acceptable to your customer!
• Customize landing pages as required; do not go with a basic lead capture form. Include filters, dropdowns, etc. so that the information captured will be relevant.
• Make sure that basic validations such as phone number, etc. are handled in the lead capture page in order to avoid bogus entries.
• You may also include security features such as CAPTCHA entry, which helps avoiding bot based submissions.
• Include additional lead verification processes after capturing the lead profile data in your lead capture, distribution and delivery system such as LeadPro247. Based on the verification results, you may filter out the leads to the lead buyer. Note that the lead verification process using 3rd party provider services such as TargusInfo, ServiceObjects, etc. incurs additional expenses (on per lead captured basis).

While implementing these ideas would not acheive 100% quality, it will certainly help improve the quality significantly, save money and retain customers.

Many lead business customers using our LeadPro247 Lead Distribution and Delivery software system that I spoke with have started experimenting with CPA Ad Networks in their lead generation strategies. During the discussions, I strongly encouraged them to test the waters with solid research and well planned strategies.

Since there are dozens of ad networks operating in the marketplace, it is essential to do a thorough research about the companies’ practices and support services before putting your offers on the networks. Also, the process is an ongoing one as new networks keep popping up in the field and some fade out of the scene.

Another area of research and exploration is that of the competition. By understanding the advertising strategies and offers of your competitors, you can avoid of a lot of mistakes and reduce the learning curve substantially.

Offer Vault service brings CPA Ad Networks and Ad Publishers together. The ad publishers (i.e. website owners and operators – known as affiliates) can compare the offers from various networks and pick the suitable ones. The ad networks send their offers (from various advertisers) to Offer Vault on a regular basis in order to attract more publishers. Your landing page and offer related information will be made available to the ad publishers.

Offer Vault service was founded by Mark Roth and I understand that Howie Schwartz, a well known internet marketer is also involved in it. The Offer Vault is completely free for anyone who registers on the site.

As a lead generation company and advertiser, you can leverage the features of the Offer Vault service to  compare advertisements from competitors and offers through other CPA networks. For example, you can visit and compare landing pages of other leadgen companies in your market segment.

CPA Ad Networks can be leveraged to maximize the return on your  lead generation efforts and reduce dependence on Pay Per Click (PPC) strategies. With the Google Adwords pricing sky rocketing in recent times and Google enforcing strict rules for quality assessment of websites and landing pages, it is critical that you diversify your leadgen practices, tools and strategies.

There are dozens of Ad Networks in the marketplace and hence you have a wide selection to choose from depending on your budget, nature of business and industry vertical.

How the Ad Networks operate?

The ad networks are basically centalized portals acting as intermediaries for publishers and advertisers. As an Advertiser you can submit your advertisements to one or more networks. Web site owners or operators (known as Publishers) choose the advertisements based on their specialization and preference and run the ads on their sites.

Typically you have to specify a rate per action performed, which is nothing but a lead acquired. This is referred to as CPA or Cost Per Action. You have to provide a suitable landing page to which the advertisers will drive the traffic from their websites. When the web visitors submit their information successfully, a thank you page need to be displayed. The thank you page will include a tracking pixel so that the ad networks can track the successful conversions and invoice you accordingly.

Importance of Landing Pages in Lead Generation via Ad Networks

As mentioned above, the Landing Page is the most important component of the lead acquisition process. Even if you get a ton of traffic to your site, if the landing page does not convert (i.e. visitors do not submit their info) you are not going to get any value out of the traffic. Make sure that the landing page is designed to convert and tested well.

You may take a look at the blog post on landing page design and optimization for lead conversion.

If you are using third party media planning / buying / ad agencies, they should be able to help you design the landing pages, negotiate the offer rates, choose suitable ad networks and track the ad performance.

CPA Ad Networks

Start with a small budget, test out the results and then ramp up your leadgen efforts with a network. Note that some offers (i.e. your advertisements) might work well with some networks and may not work with others. Also, the same ad might produce results at one time and might fail to perform at another point time. Since there are so many variables in play, it is very difficult to generalize and rate the networks. However, you should be able to evaluate their business practices, support levels, etc. over a period of time.

Here is some of the popular and not so popular networks listed not in any particular order. Note that there are dozens of networks operating in the marketplace and hence this is not a comprehensive list.

• Ad Canadian
• AdMedia
• Adjuice
• Adjump
• Admax Media
• Adscend Media
• Axon Media Group
• Clickbooth
• Click Fusion
• Commission Monster
• Commission River
• Commission Junction
• Convert2Media
• Copeac
• CPA Underground
• CPaway
• CXDigital
• DirectLeads
• eComLeads
• FluxAds
• GetAds
• HybrydAds
• Hydra Network
• Leader Markets
• Lead Expose
• Market Leverage
• Max Bounty
• NetPartner
• NeverBlue
• Offer Fusion
• PeerFly
• Pepperjam
• Revenue Ads
• Revenue Loop
• Revenue Street
• UniBlue Systems
• Unique Leads
• Y Multimedia
• Zeno Ads

Advantages and Disadvantages of using CPA Ad Networks for Leadgen

Just like any other mode of lead generation, using CPA Ad Networks has its own advantages and issues. If you understand the issues, you can plan and reduce the impact. Let us reserve this discussion for another post.