Wise Startup Blog

How can you sell ads to major brands such as Pepsi and Nike? As a young, inexperienced entrepreneur it can be a daunting task. Luckily, the IAB has just published lead quality accountability best practices designed to improve communications between agencies and publishers in the lead generation industry.

Selling online advertising is all about relationships. Well that’s great if you already have relationships with people, but for entrepreneurs, that doesn’t help much — we need to make these connections, and foster the relationships from there.

So what are the correct means for finding quality leads at ad agencies?

Lead Accountability Best Practices

Lead quality is a core evaluation standard for advertisers, agencies and publishers. For advertisers, lead quality has a direct impact on return on investment for marketing and on operational efficiency for sales. Buying large volumes of low quality leads means that advertisers are spending a significant portion of their advertising budget on leads that have little chance of converting into customers. Moreover, the time and effort the advertiser’s sales force spends on trying to convert these low quality leads is time and effort taken away from focusing on the high quality leads, meaning that some leads with a high probability to convert are not receiving the prompt attention required to convert them into customers right away.

Brokering

• Unless permitted in the contract by the advertiser or its authorized agency, a publisher should not broker a lead generation campaign to any other publisher, network or agency.

Many advertisers who use online lead generation are diligent about tracking the conversion rate of all leads to sales. They track leads by source so that they can optimize their media spend toward lead sources that convert at the highest rate or at an acceptable rate. If a publisher brokers a lead campaign to third parties without the advertiser’s knowledge, optimization decisions may become flawed. In addition, many advertisers require Quality Assurance (QA) processes to be completed for each placement. If campaigns are brokered without the advertiser’s knowledge, the QA processes would not be able to be performed.

This best practice is particularly important when lead generation campaigns are not hosted by the advertiser and are hosted by the publisher.

• If the advertiser does permit a campaign to be brokered, the campaign’s terms and conditions offered by the brokering party to the third party should be absolutely consistent with the contractual terms and conditions stipulated by the advertiser, unless the advertiser provides written approval for any changes to those terms and conditions.

It is important that all publishers involved in a campaign have the same contractual obligations and requirements, including acceptable lead generation methods, disclosures, etc., throughout the brokered ecosystem. The advertiser should be confident that the campaign is running according to its terms, regardless of whether or not the advertiser has a direct relationship with a lead generation source.

Incentivization / Pre-selection

• Unless permitted in writing by the advertiser or its authorized agency, a publisher should not offer any incentives to consumers in return for submitting a lead, regardless of whether the campaign is hosted by the publisher or the advertiser.

Examples of incentives include cash, prizes, reward points, services, entertainment, or content. Requiring a consumer to choose one of multiple advertiser offers in order to receive an incentive is considered incentivization and should be done with written permission from the advertiser or its authorized agency.

• If the advertiser does permit the publisher to offer incentives in return for leads being submitted to the advertiser, it is the publisher’s full responsibility to:

1. Completely and plainly disclose the terms and conditions of the incentive opportunity,
2. Fulfill the incentive if earned, and
3. Promptly and professionally handle any customer service issue relating to the terms or fulfillment of such incentive.

• Publishers should not pre-select lead generation offers without written approval by the advertiser or its authorized agency.

Pre-selection is acceptable for custom offers; however, consumers should be shown a clear and conspicuous link to enable them to skip the offer instead of submit their information to the advertiser.

Lead / Data Ownership

• Publishers should assume that additional data gathered as part of an advertiser’s lead generation campaign – beyond any data collected in the publisher’s registration process – is owned solely by that advertiser.

If the publisher considers such data to be co-owned by the advertiser and publisher and if that data may be used for optimization and targeting during the registration process, the publisher should notify the advertiser in writing that this is the publisher’s intention (i.e., targeting and optimization of subsequent offers). Such disclosure should be included in the publisher’s terms and conditions in addition to their privacy policy.

• If the publisher intends to sell a lead it generates to multiple advertisers in the same industry vertical, the publisher should notify the advertiser(s) in writing, in the publisher contract, in advance of any such sale.
• The publisher hosting a lead generation offer should not duplicate or otherwise use any information contained within the lead data for its own purpose or interest, or for the purpose or interest of any third party or itself, except as specifically authorized or agreed to by the advertiser.
• In order to maintain the integrity of the data, publisher should authorize the advertiser to seed the leads.

Seeding is the practice of submitting a unique set of data as part of a lead intentionally for the purpose of tracking the use of that data.

• In order to validate any lead filtering conducted by the advertiser as part of accepting leads from the publisher, the publisher should seed the leads.

Advertisers sometimes require the ability to filter all leads submitted by a publisher and only use and pay for leads that meet a pre-defined set of criteria. For example, an advertiser may stipulate that it will reject leads that are duplicated within the advertiser’s existing file of leads for the past quarter. In this example, if matching incoming leads against an existing file of leads can only be done by the advertiser, the publisher would seed the leads they submit to the advertiser in order to detect the advertiser’s potential use of any data from leads it rejected.

Source Coding

Source coding is the process by which advertiser- or agency-supplied identification codes are appended to leads for the purpose of tracking a publisher’s placement of offers and tracking a lead throughout the advertiser’s lead conversion process. Source coding facilitates transparency within the advertiser/publisher relationship and serves as a means for advertisers and their agencies to track the publisher placement of offers and the quality of leads from all publishers involved in the campaign.

• The advertiser should provide each publisher with a source code that is unique to the campaign.
• The advertiser should provide the publisher with clear information regarding the specific source(s) that are approved for the campaign.
• Publishers should append source code information to each lead, when requested by the advertiser.
• A source code should only be appended to those leads that originate from the advertiser-approved sources for a given campaign (See “Brokering” section above for more detail.)
• Ad Networks should provide a unique source code to each affiliate and track placements at the affiliate level throughout the network, if requested by the advertiser.