In the field of marketing where there is stiff competition among players, the one with the best strategies take an extra share of the pie. Every company does not have the expertise to market itself online. What it then does is take help from an Agency or a consultant.
Let us now look at a case wherein there is a company- lets name it ABC Company which is a corporate training institute and an Agency- XYZ agency. ABC Company has hired XYZ Company for formulating a marketing plan for itself. ABC has a website that gives host of information to its users. Currently ABC through its organic search and other offline marketing activities manages to generate 1000 leads. It has entered into a contract with XYZ wherein the cost model is- any lead that XYZ brings over and above 1000 would be paid 180 Rs per lead. This gives a clear picture that both the organizations have entered into a Cost per lead model. Let us now understand the pros and cons associated with this CPL model.
From an Agency perspective nothing could be more lucrative than this offer. It is far better than cost per conversion or sales model. What it can ideally do is do an on page and off page SEO and create an AdWord account for ABC. But the cost for the agency could be on a higher side and leads might not be guaranteed. Another option is buying leads from a third party vendor and presenting it to the company.
From a company’s perspective, since it does not have the expertise, it has to go with an agency for generating leads. The time, effort and money that ABC would have otherwise spent on lead generation could be diverted in some other activities like getting the conversions done.
But here in this model lies a great challenge for the company. The agency can very well get away with fake leads ( self filled leads, database bought out from the open market) for the company and charge the fees for the same. The challenge for the company would be to find out the genuineness of the leads and not overpay for worthless leads.
We have identified the case problem as- Ways for ABC to find out the authenticity of the leads. How would ABC go about doing it? Let us now try to solve this problem for ABC.Let us first try to understand how the lead would get generated. ABC has to have a contact us page or a form wherein the visitors would fill in some basic details like their name and mandatorily their contact number and/or email ID. Any visitor filling out the form would be counted as a lead.
- The first thing that ABC needs to do is ask the agency to tag its AdWord account to ABC’s Analytics and look at its Analytics Report. The Traffic Sources report in Google Analytics is handy information that gives a glimpse of the agency’s performance across all its campaigns.
- The next thing that ABC could do is ask the Agency to create a separate contact us page for its campaigns. Once a separate page is created, that detail too would be shown in the Traffic source Report and give a clear idea of the leads generated by the separate form.
- ABC can create separate urls ( not pages by using “?” ) for all the different sources through which the agency is going to bring in traffic and conversions.
- The fake leads filled in by the Agency would appear as direct traffic in analytics and if the past data and the new data has a huge difference ABC will have all the reason to believe the agency has been filling leads at their end.
These few simple steps can definitely save ABC for not paying for in genuine leads.
