Lead Quality Accountability Best Practices – IAB’s Initiative at Market Transparency in Online Advertising

Given the fact that there aren’t any bodies in India that set online advertising standard or officially set the guidelines I head back to IAB to see standards development that can be implemented here as well. Although IAB is essentially just a consortium of over nearly 300 media bodies in USA who account for over 3/4th of the online advertising there. Earlier this month IAB introduced a new initative at creating transparency between agencies and publishers over quality leads with the Lead Quality Accountability Best Practices document.

The recommendations outlined in this document address two main areas:

1. Define best practices for advertiser sharing of invalid leads with publishers to improve the process of accounting for leads.
2. Define best practices for advertiser sharing of converted leads with publishers to improve advertiser conversions and ROI.

The document is organized by first defining an invalid lead, then recommends a standardized process for evaluating leads, and finally discusses creating feedback loops for converted leads with publishers.

We have blogged about the call for besides the lack of standardisation in the Indian digital advertising industry with stories of publisher malpractices as well as messed up analytics and reporting courting attention often. A best practices document like the one by IAB can start as a starting point to arrive at a India centric solution to what is perhaps the industry’s Achilles heel. Some of the recommendations of the document includes:

• Publishers and advertisers should establish the definition of a valid and invalid lead upfront in the contract.
• Advertisers should return invalid leads to publishers with detailed reason codes in real-time or in a timeframe agreed to upfront.
• Publishers should use returned invalid lead data to optimize traffic sources, improve creative, and refine targeting.
• Advertisers should return converted leads to publishers based on a timeframe that matches their evaluation cycle if permitted by advertiser privacy and corporate policies. Publishers should use converted lead data to further optimize traffic, improve creative, refine targeting, and build custom targeting models to identify future valuable customers.

Standards and best practices can only give direction to effort and never be the end all for work ethics. Given the nascency of the digital industry we are best placed to put strong governance and values in the way we work, especially as publishers. And at the same time agencies and advertisers need to understand the medium and see that while they make the most of its advantages they don’t overlook its limitations while measuring campaigns. I am in a preachy mood today and it is reflecting in my voice as well I guess. Hopefully, the year 2009 will be the watershed year for digital media scaling up with standards and best practices and some all round successful advertising campaigns.