The Explosion Of Hosted Lead Generation... Good and Bad

by Eric Obeck, Thursday, Jul 26, 2007 3:30 PM ET

IT HAS BEEN A LONG time coming, but 2007 is seeing the explosion (in a bad way) of third-party hosted lead generation. I predict, however, that later this year and in 2008 we will see an explosion (in a good way) of this type of lead generation. Hopefully, marketers won't be so snake-bit by a previous bad experience that they avoid jumping back into the market when the best opportunities in hosted lead generation begin to avail themselves shortly down the road. I define "hosted lead generation" as the practice of marketers positioning lead forms on third party Web sites wherein the consumer completes the form, submits it and his or her data is transferred to the marketer. Leads from co-registrations and lead aggregators would fall into this category. Many marketers had bad experiences with these types of leads in the past because some third-party Web sites that host such leads took measures to gather the leads, which ultimately compromised the true intent of the consumer and therefore the quality of the leads generated. For example, offering incentives, prizes, gifts, or "points" to fill in lead forms generally does not improve the quality of the leads you receive. While there are exceptions to this statement, things recently got a bit out-of-hand with this practice. In many cases, because the lead forms were not hosted by the advertiser, the advertiser did not know the context in which someone filled in the form. As I write this, there are brilliant minds working in far-off corners of the Internet to expose the bad practices and clean things up. These minds work for publishers, advertisers, ad agencies, government agencies, trade groups, etc... The smoke from the bad "explosion" is now clearing and, from what I've seen, best practices are emerging. Several initiatives are already in place to promote a positive shift in hosted lead generation. OLGA (the Online Lead Generation Association) and I are working together to prepare a series of sessions for the upcoming OMMA East conference dedicated to lead-generation best-practices. Also, I have been pleased to participate in drafting sessions for a Lead Generation Best Practices document that the Interactive Advertising Bureau will likely publish in the next few weeks. I'm most excited to be a part of two projects involving highly credible Fortune 500 companies that are developing hosted lead generation capabilities on their Web sites. Both receive highly targeted and valuable traffic - in fact, well over 10 million unique visitors a month. Both will absolutely deploy best practices when it comes to hosted lead generation. I can't help but think that other big initiatives I don't know about are taking place behind the scenes, all of which are going to lead to a significant and positive explosion in online hosted lead generation in the very near future. Get ready! Eric Obeck is president of SendTec, Inc., a marketer providing a full complement of multi-channel agency services integrated with the search channel.