Lead distribution (routing)

Legend:

• Affiliate partner = Marketer or a Company delivering traffic for commissions
• Advertiser = Lead Generation company or Provider of some service buying traffic
• Lead = customer’s data usually from filled form
• API integration = method of sending lead

Everyone knows that affiliate partners generate website traffic and redirect it to the website of an advertiser for commissions. In some industries, this link redirection is the only way how it’s done.

But in industries such as Finance there is also another available method of delivering customers – sending Leads from custom forms or iframes forms through API. Meaning sending the lead (customers data) directly to the CRM of the advertiser without the need of the customer to visit the advertiser’s website. 

This method of delivering customers opens doors to new, more efficient opportunities of generating traffic and as a result, creating competitive advantage. There are more approaches of how the traffic can be delivered through API and in this article I will describe the most common ones:

1. Exclusive Distribution
2. Non-Exclusive Distribution
3. Exclusive Auction Distribution
4. User-Centric Distribution¨

Exclusive Distribution

Imagine you will fill an iframe form for a loan and an automated system will pick one provider (advertiser) for you. That is the Exclusive Distribution. The logic of choosing the right provider might be in either:

• customer’s data analysis and scoring, where the supplier (be it affiliate partner or lead generation company) is looking for the best fit
• or simply by offering the lead to the advertiser with the highest predefined commissions (either per sale or lead) for delivered customers. Where in this setup, the advertiser might have specified several commissions per a lead depending on the lead quality. Thus the advertiser distribution list might look like this:

Important thing here is that the lead is offered to one advertiser at a time. Which means that the selling process takes longer, but it provides better control and security for the lead data.

There is no input needed from the customer and everything is automatized, which means the customer has fewer places to drop off. But on the other hand, some customers might not welcome the automated pick and might prefer to pick themselves.

Exclusive Auction Distribution

We will stay in the Exclusive Distribution for a moment longer. Special case of Exclusive Distribution is Auction Distribution, where the lead is offered to ALL advertisers at once and the commission for the lead is not predefined, but is unique for each lead. Thus in realtime the Advertisers are bidding on the lead and the highest bid wins (there is only one round of bidding).

However, this method requires a high technological level of the advertisers since they need to be able to do customer scoring within a few seconds or under a minute at max.

Non-Exclusive Distribution

In case of less technologically developed markets it might not be possible to offer the lead to one advertiser, because the advertiser is not capable of scoring the customer properly and the conversion from the lead to sale is low. Thus the commissions are low as a result.

In this case, there is Non-Exclusive Distribution, in which the lead is offered to more advertisers at once depending on predefined filters and maybe a light scoring. In the end, more advertisers will be interested in the customer and the customer will be sold to all of them or part of them at the same time.

User-Centric Distribution

If you want to give more power to your users, there is User Centric Distribution. The users themselves choose where they want to be sold to. 

The lead is offered to all advertisers at once and only the interested advertisers are shown. Users can then choose which offers to proceed with. The advantage of this approach is obviously the user experience of the users since they have more control over the whole process. Plus the user might be interested to proceed with more offers at the same time to increase the chances of approval or even to take several loans. The disadvantage is that the user has more opportunities to drop off.

Summary

And of course, there is a whole process behind this. Lead verification, filters for lead routing, redirect possibilities and more. But Paldock has it all including all Lead distribution types, so you can test what type suits your business the best.

Once you will start to deal with distribution of the lead, new opportunities arise but also threats. The process and mainly the iframe form needs to be done flawlessly, so the users have fewer places to drop off. We got you covered. As a part of Paldock, there is also a robust iframe form builder so you or your affiliate does not have to worry. This difficult technological part is already done and can be customized for your needs.

PRO TIP: Are you an advertiser and think this is not for you? Wrong! You can monetize your rejected leads with our Lead Distribution feature to get the most out of it, so you can buy more customers you want.