Trademob, a mobile app marketing platform, found “that 40 percent of clicks are essentially worthless, creating a conversion rate to install an app from an app store of less than 0.1 percent. Trademob found that 22 percent of clicks are accidental, while 18 percent are fraudulent.” While Trademob’s research was focused on mobile apps, it’s not unreasonable to assume that click fraud can occur anywhere online. For companies that rely heavily on online lead generation to sustain their customer acquisition programs, click fraud can result in a major waste of budgets and have a negative impact on your overall sales pipeline.

Imagine you ran an ad on a popular industry website for a month, costing you $250, and 100 people clicked on that ad. 100 “leads” from one ad for $250 sounds like a pretty fantastic deal, right? Your CPC (cost-per-click) is $2.5 which is considerably lower than your company’s usual CPL (cost-per-lead) of $8.50. However, if 40% of those clicks bounce right away from your landing page you’re really only getting 60 “real” clicks from your ad. Now your real CPC is $4.16, almost double your original calculations!

But remember—just because someone clicked on your banner ad that doesn’t mean they’ve automatically converted into a lead. Chances are your ad takes them to some kind of lead form where they can download a white paper, register for a demo or take some other action. Of the 60 clicks that arrived on this landing page, maybe only 10 actually bothered to convert. Now your real CPL is $25, three times your usual CPL!

So was your $250 investment really a “good deal?” You may have earned 10 new leads for your sales team, but the end cost was much greater than you had originally anticipated.

One of the biggest issues with most online lead generation tactics is that you pay per click, not per lead. If 1,000 people click on your link or ad and you have to pay $3.50 per click that’s a cool $3,500 out of your lead generation budget and there is no guarantee that even ¼ of those clicks will become solid leads, or that they are even real people! A large portion of your budget is wasted on click fraud and “curiosity clickers” that have no real intention of converting. While online lead generation can be very valuable for companies dependent on their industry, it’s not foolproof nor is it always the cheapest option.

By the way, new developments in performance-based campaigns leverage the customer voice channel as a net new opportunity to acquire customers. Unlike traditional online lead generation programs, the SalesPortal partnership marketing network lets marketers bid for live lead transfers from contact centers with branded enterprises, giving them much needed control over the real costs of their customer acquisition program. Additionally, companies are only required to pay for live lead transfers that stay connected for at least 20 seconds, essentially eliminating the chance for a voice-channel version of click fraud.

SalesPortal today announced it has developed and deployed a powerful recommendation engine as a core component of its platform. The new capability simplifies the matching of relevant enterprise contact centers and marketers based on product and demographic relevance.

SalesPortal’s recommendation engine intelligently matches partners, improves lead generation campaign effectiveness and delivers a higher return on marketing investments. It automatically recommends relevant marketing partners for enterprises with contact centers based on the business category of the company, the product or service offered by each partner and customer demographics.

Using a content-based filtering system adopted by leading product recommendation websites, SalesPortal’s recommendation engine:

• Matches companies based on business, product and customer criteria
• Prioritizes best matches using weight-based rankings
• Utilizes intelligent algorithms to identify patterns and develop suggested partner pairings
• Tracks campaign successes
• Determines relevance at the campaign level so companies can use different product and demographic criteria for each campaign
• Learns as it goes – factoring in historical campaign performance and effectiveness

“We’ve built an intelligent, advanced recommendation engine with a simple user interface,” said Sujay Rao, SalesPortal’s director of product management. “Companies will find the strongest matches for their product and service and make the most relevant campaign connections to optimize campaign performance.”

SalesPortal’s latest capabilities are available immediately for managed services customers and will be available to all users within 30 days.

“Our new recommendation engine will provide a logical starting point for successful pay-per-call campaigns,” said Kevin Sandhu, SalesPortal’s vice president of product management. “It matches partners for the highest relevance to achieve the greatest return on investment, opt-in rates and lead-to-sale conversions.”