#leadverification

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The Hidden Cost of Lead Generation Fraud in Pay-Per-Call Campaigns & How to Stop It

If you are selling products or services online in the US, there’s a good chance that you have dabbled with performance marketing or pay-per-call (PPC) campaigns, as they are commonly called. In fact, these days, in order to drive any kind of business online at scale, PPC campaigns have emerged as a necessity, and for good reason.

In a perfect world, PPC campaigns have the potential to provide businesses with high-intent leads that can easily be converted into paying customers. Many brands have deployed significantly large teams of sales experts to handle the leads generated by PPC campaigns and drive conversions.

Unfortunately, the world isn’t perfect, and modern PPC campaigns are plagued with lead generation fraud. Fraudsters use a variety of simple and sophisticated techniques to defraud advertisers and waste their ad spending while making a quick buck in the process. The worst part is that the wasted ad spend has just a short-term impact on such fraudulent activities. In the longer run, scammers can skew the metrics that advertisers use to plan their campaigns. As a result, lead generation fraud can have lasting effects on any brand’s PPC performance.

Let us look at this problem in more detail.

The Problem: How Lead Generation Fraud is Hurting Pay-Per-Call Campaigns

Lead generation fraud is a huge problem, especially for advertisers operating at a large scale. This problem can be made easy to understand by breaking it down into its components:

1. Fake and Invalid Leads

The most noticeable impact of fake campaigns is the fake lead generation with the use of bots and duplicates. Fraud publishers employ bots and in some cases, real people to click on ads and generate calls. However, since these calls are generated with the sole purpose of defrauding the advertisers and securing unethical monetary gains for the fraudsters, they have no real intent behind them and never convert into paying customers. The only losing party in this mix is the advertiser who ends up paying for calls that have no chance of converting, no matter how well a sales team works on them.

2. High Volume Of Fake Engagements

Fake and invalid leads generated with the use of bots of poorly paid employees of fraud publishers generate a lot of engagement but drive no real value. In fact, they drain ad budgets that could otherwise drive engagements that boost the business’ bottom line. Similarly, the fake calls generated also engage call center resources that could be otherwise used to engage with genuinely interested prospects. This reduces the operational efficiency of the call centers.

3. Lack Of Pre-Call Filtering Mechanisms

Most businesses don’t have a mechanism for lead validation designed for filtering out bad and fake leads before their call gets connected to their call center. This results in increased cost-per-acquisition (CPC) for the advertiser.

To know more about Impact of Lead Generation Fraud on Brands CLICK HERE

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What is outsourced lead generation?

In simple words, Outsourcing Lead Generation means that you are hiring an agency that would generate leads for your business. Now the question that most people have is, Why should we outsource?

I have written few points that will help you understand this and also help you to decide if you should outsource lead generation or not.

When should you consider outsourcing?

When you need to lower costs

One of the main benefits of outsourcing is that it is more economical than hiring and training a new team.

59% of businesses use outsourcing to reduce their expenses.

So if you have a limited budget for marketing or are looking to cut down on costs like in this time of a pandemic, outsourcing will make a good investment.

When core business competencies are in focus

If your company is at a stage where there are aggressive plans laid down for growth, you would want to concentrate on your core competencies of which marketing might not be a part.

And, if this is the case, outsourcing would prove to be an effective decision for your company as it will be able to perform at its best not only in the department of specialization but also in many others.

You are not getting the results you are expecting

‘Try, till you succeed’ – is a very motivating thought, but not in this case. Not achieving the expected results repeatedly is an indicator that you need a change in your marketing team. This can either be by outsourcing it to an agency or simply hiring a specialist.

These indicators may be in terms of not achieving your target number of leads or ROI – which is one of the most used Key Performance Indicators used by companies to measure success.

You do not have the resources

Marketing is a multidisciplinary field where one for all doesn’t work. Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, is done with the help of channels such as Google Ads, SEO, Email, where each of these requires a skill set. So unless you can set up an entire in-house marketing team, outsourcing is a wiser choice.

You lack the time

Marketing cannot be part-time. It is often an around-the-endeavor. So if you are a company that has a part of its team on the marketer’s seat, they may not find enough time with all the team meetings, client calls, and due to their other tasks.

In this case, not only marketing but even the performance in other departments may take a toll. Therefore, if you are such a company, rethinking your marketing strategy may be a necessity.

To outsource marketing or not, depends on your company’s needs. The above-listed points will help you understand these needs and assist you in deciding whether your company should hire a marketing agency like Logichron or hire in-house.

Logichron is a leading B2B marketing and Lead generation agency that has helped many Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies with their marketing goals. You can know more about us here.

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What is Lead Generation?

Where traditional marketing methods such as mass emails used to be enough to attract customers, increased competition and an abundance of information make it difficult for companies to follow up, reach out, and engage potential customers. Lead generation, the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service to develop a sales pipeline, allows companies to further their goals until they are ready to buy.

Lead generation can be useful for any type or size of the business, and for both B2C and B2B spaces. 60% of marketers say that lead generation is a key point for their company. Determining a good lead is more complex than just targeting the people who downloaded your whitepaper, and it's important that your sales reps don't waste time calling unqualified leads when there are ways to narrow the pool.

If you want to know how you can utilize lead generation techniques in your business then you must read this article on “What is Lead Generation and why it is important for B2B business