FlexxDigital have worked with various businesses over the last half-decade, delivering 250,000 leads in just one incredible year.

However, the tides are turning in the lead generation world, and clients now value the quality of leads over quantity. If you asked any business whether they’d like 1000 cheaper leads of mixed-quality or 100, more expensive, leads that convert at 25%, the answer would be the latter every time.

This puts a third-party PPC agency under a tremendous amount of pressure. Whether they’re on the Cost Per Lead (CPL) model or a retainer contract, falling foul of a client’s expectations can have a massive impact on an agency’s financial future.

It’s impossible to ensure a great lead every time someone fills out a landing page. However, with the use of validation tools, you can at least minimise the risk of those reputation-ruining fake numbers and email addresses.

What Is Lead Validation?

Lead validation helps separate real web leads from fake leads generated from your advertising campaigns.

When it comes to sending leads to their clients, many marketers hand over whatever they have without checking the quality.

While this has no immediate impact on the agency (as they get paid for leads in volume), businesses engaged with the marketing agency will see a rapid decline in their ROI and stop paying for the service.

Poor-quality leads include:

• Spam form submissions
• Fake emails and telephone numbers

As a PPC marketer who relies on getting clients top-quality leads, a crucial part of your role includes sifting through the form submissions and telephone enquiries you generate. Using the tools I recommend below, you should be able to separate the true leads from poor leads like the ones listed above.

Why Is Lead Validation Important?

If your client isn’t happy, you’re not happy either.

Great quality leads are defined by their contact rate. If you generate 100 leads for your client, there will be a portion of people who won’t get back in contact even if they’re “qualified”.

If you can boost the contact rate up to 50% or 60%, however, your client will love you. Because you’ve done the hard work (the sifting – generating leads is the easy part), the client’s sales team can hop on the phones immediately, knowing that the leads are hot and ready to go.

How To Validate Your Leads With Unbounce

One of the biggest reasons a lead isn’t “high quality” is due to a fake or incorrect telephone number.

There are two ways we validate telephone numbers within our agency. The first one concerns an inbuilt tool on the drag-and-drop website builder, Unbounce.

We use Unbounce to create all our pages within our agency, and it makes building lead gen funnels super quick and easy.

One incredibly useful feature comes within their form fields. Acting as a basic validator, Unbounce prevents the prospect from putting too few or too many digits into their telephone number. In the UK, you need 11 figures to be recognised as a valid mobile number. If the potential lead puts in 12, for example, a pop-up will appear on the Unbounce page, preventing the user from completing the form.

This is a simple way to prevent incorrect numbers from prospects. However, Unbounce isn’t yet smart enough to recognise fake numbers. To truly up your validation game, you can use another software to ensure lead quality.

Validate Telephone Numbers With Loqate

We also use Loqate to validate telephone numbers at FlexxDigital. Loqate is a highly sophisticated tool that’s able to scan an extensive database of telephone numbers within a specified country.

If the telephone number provided doesn’t match one within the database, then Loqate won’t allow the prospect to proceed with the form.

You can use Loqate in synergy with website builders like Unbounce. Services like these don’t come cheap, especially if you’re processing hundreds of leads a day. However, lead quality is improved so drastically, it’s worth a trial if you have high-ticket clients with the resources to chase lots of prospects.

Address Validation With Loqate

Loqate isn’t just restricted to telephone numbers, it manages addresses too.

You’ve probably seen the same technique when you’ve put in a shipping address online. When they need to fill out their address, the prospect just needs to type in their postcode. As they type, Loqate will come up with all the addresses within that area. The user selects the correct address, and Loqate populates the field automatically.

This saves the prospect a couple of minutes (reducing the chance they’ll click off the page), and prevents them from withholding their address. Using Loqate, you’ll see a dramatic increase in both lead-quality and conversion rate. For the sake of killing two birds with one stone, the extra costs are a no brainer for your agency.

Conclusion

Consistently selling high-quality leads is a great way to build up a level of trust with your clients, and to ensure they’ll use your services again and again.

Try out these validation tools and techniques, and see if they improve your overall lead quality. I promise you, you won’t be disappointed!