Junk Leads – a source of great inefficiency.

Junk leads. It’s something we as marketers deal with every day. Amy Holtzman and Craig Rosenberg spoke in a webinar hosted by Demand Gen Report‘s Kelly Lindenau on this topic. Some key points:

Fake leads come in several different forms, from easily definable malicious leads to seemingly real leads.

They lead to frustration and waste throughout the marketing and sales process, starting with wasted ad spend (in case of paid acquired leads), a polluted CRM, and wasted sales rep time as a result of no-shows – and even missed revenue opportunities as real leads can not be converted.

Amy Holtzman showed an insightful example of the cost of fake leads for an organization that experienced a whopping 21% fake leads in their demo sign-up, with their business development reps spending on average an hour on fake leads (prepping / sitting in the first 10 min of the call / following up). On a yearly basis, the cost of lost time of the BDR’s alone topped $800K. 

Besides purchasing a commercially available fake lead mitigation solution, you can mitigate some of this problem by identifying specific behaviors of these ‘fakers’ (human or bot) and create custom audiences in your GA4 Analytics. This can help hone in on their source (e.g. certain display placements) and it can help you avoid spending money on retargeting fake leads by excluding the fake lead audience.