double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Large Internet lead buyers bear most of the risk today. They constantly need new Internet lead suppliers who have quality leads. They can’t afford to spend money testing these new sources – and they can’t afford not to.

In his helpful blog post (http://bit.ly/dcSQk4), our friend Mike Ferree over at LeadCritic.com offers three suggestions for Internet lead buyers to vet companies before spending thousands of dollars testing them out.

In this post, we’ve got a 4^th option for keeping a firm grip on those thousands.

Mike’s options are great for determining whether companies are telling you the truth about how they generate leads. In sum, Mike says; 1) Request the domains of the sites they generate leads on; 2) Go to compete.com and find out the traffic history for each domain; 3) Go to SEMrush.com for more specific data around their organic rankings and paid search spend.

These methods will help you determine the intent of the Internet lead source. But they won’t tell you about the quality of the Internet leads themselves.

The 4^th option is to route test leads to a company like DoublePositive, which does live Internet lead transfers. We try to make contact and convert the folks we do contact, and we feed you real time data about what we are experiencing. For example:

Graph provided by, Tim Watts, DoublePositive Director of Data Analytics

The test supply had a decent contact rate, which is consistent with what we’d expect. But there is a problem. Very few of the test leads were interested or qualified to buy. A dismally low percentage of them converted compared to Suppliers A and B.

How to correct the problem is the supplier’s job. Your job is to know there is a problem – and to know it in real time, not thousands of dollars later.

And to our good friends who supply Internet leads – wouldn’t you rather know first?

Back to Mike’s point, everybody wants the new lead source to be successful. That’s what’s great about our industry – it can be a win-win-win. But I believe that winning is all of our responsibility.

In our next post, I’ll give you a look under the hood to show you how DoublePositive does its part.

Meantime let us hear from you in the comments below. Do you have an option #5?