double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

If you’ve been following this blog, visited DoublePositive’s website, or talked to us at a trade show, you’re probably familiar with our “Evolution of Online Marketing” story. In short, the story explains how online advertising has moved from a pricing model based on ad impressions (CPM), then to clicks (CPC), and then to a performance-based model that is based on cost per lead/acquisition (CPL/CPA). Finally, we introduce the idea of CPT (cost per transfer), which is the most evolved model, delivering a double-verified live call transfer of a consumer directly to a sales professional. You don’t get any more “evolved” than that.

Sure, we sell “leads” — and so do lots of companies. But not all leads are created equal. List services, for example, sell cold lists and say they are “leads.” Online lead generators sell leads, but those leads are sold (multiple times) before any verification or qualification of the contact’s information or intent has been done. So doesn’t the industry need to recognize the difference between leads and qualified leads?

If you had to give it a label, Cost Per Qualified Lead makes sense. Yet, a Google or Yahoo search for cost per qualified lead, CPQ or CPQL brings up just a handful of results, most of which are articled and blog posts from the last several months. So the momentum is building, and that’s good news. The online advertising industry is always evolving, and a measurement like CPQ/CPQL is one measure that lead buyers need to be able to compare apples to oranges — or leads to qualified leads.

If you are a lead buyer, try asking your lead generation company what their “Cost Per Qualified Lead” is. I would love to know how they try to answer that one.