Identity Verification: Know the Leads You’re Buying or Selling

Whether you’re buying or selling leads, or you’re an affiliate network that moderates the process, you want to be sure all consumers going through your system meet your expectations. If you’re an affiliate, you’d only like to submit qualified leads for sale; if you’re an advertiser, you’d only want to purchase leads that match your demographic and intent. 

ID verification does all of that, allowing you to identify who your leads are, what they want, whether they are fresh or duplicate, and even how likely they are to convert. On top of that, you can get some industry-specific details, like whether the lead has undergone foreclosure.

And you can do it in real-time BEFORE you’ve bought the lead. 

Even in complex industries, ID verification can be a great starting point to block fraudulent activity and flag suspicious leads. And then you can handle pre-qualified leads without having to spend time and resources on leads that have been disqualified at the preliminary ID check.

Without any further ado, let’s dig deeper into ID verification and how it can help you collect the best leads on the market.

“We’ve seen a lot of people come to us and say, “Finally, I’ve got a trusted, transparent, virtuous process for running performance and partner marketing in one place, paying only for vetted outcomes.” They didn’t know it existed, or they knew it existed but in very bite-size chunks.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Affiliate Marketing Podcast

Book a demo to learn how you can synergise lead verification, tracking, distribution, and analytics within Phonexa’s comprehensive performance marketing software suite.

What Is Customer Identity Verification?

As a performance marketer, you focus on mitigating risks when buying or selling leads, and that’s exactly what identity verification does, allowing you to check the identity and background of the leads that go through your system. 

In practice, identity verification boils down to integrating ID verification software that screens the leads you’re offered or the ones you’re about to submit. Importantly, if you want to reject leads that don’t pass identity verification, you need to do the ID check before the purchase.

Alternatively, you can use lead management software that already includes identity verification. Within our performance marketing ecosystem, iClear does the job, thoroughly dissecting leads before you accept them.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Identity Verification

Regardless of whether you’re doing identity verification or any other check, there are two main ways in which you can do it: before the purchase (or before the lead is submitted for sale) and after the purchase (or after you’ve submitted the lead for sale).

• Synchronous verification is a type of verification where the system pauses the acquisition process before the lead is checked. This way, you can prevent irrelevant, low-quality, and fraudulent leads from entering your pipeline.
• Asynchronous verification is a type of verification where the system checks the lead without pausing the acquisition process. This way, you can get insights into publishers, traffic channels, and campaigns while purchasing the lead as quickly as you can.

Synchronous identity verification might seem superior at first sight, but since it pauses lead acquisition, you may not always have enough time to buy the lead. Sometimes, in competitive markets, you may want to check leads asynchronously.

But you don’t necessarily have to verify all leads – instead, you can choose a specific category of leads you’d like to check and the percentage of leads you’d like to check. For example, you can check 10% of all leads coming from Liverpool and 40% of leads coming from Manchester, as well as narrow it down to demographics and even psychographics levels.

The Lead Data You Need to Make Sure You Buy or Sell Legitimate Leads

First things first: while data verification, including ID verification, can only improve the quality of your traffic, the optimal verification type and depth – and, therefore, the associated costs – differ for each campaign. 

For example, if you’ve been buying leads successfully from the same source for a long time, you may only need basic, randomised verification, such as verifying 5% to 10% of your leads to keep things in control. On the other hand, if the publisher is new or traffic is expensive, you might want to verify all incoming leads until you make sure you’re in a cost-effective territory. 

On a similar note, the industry you’re in also dictates the type of verification you need. Some checks are generic – such as first name, last name, address, SSN, date of birth, etc. – while some are quite specific, like a bankruptcy records check, foreclosures check, or liens check.

Here are some examples:

• Bankruptcy check: For most financial leads, it makes sense to verify their bankruptcy records to evaluate the associated risk level. On the one hand, you may want to decline leads with bankruptcy records on their credit reports; on the other hand, you might want to negotiate a lower price for such leads
• Criminal and infractions check: More often than not, leads with criminal history are riskier, so you might want to perform criminal and infraction checks in industries like finance, real estate, insurance, and legal.
• Background verification: If you have a lower risk tolerance, you might want to check the lead’s background thoroughly to make sure the acquisition risks are minimal. Full background verification costs more, but it also provides more visibility.

The other important detail is how much other information you’ve collected. For example, if you’ve already verified the lead’s email, especially if you’re purchasing cheaper leads for email campaigns, you may not want to verify their ID.

Book a demo to learn more about how you can verify your leads in real-time with Phonexa.

Beyond Identity Verification: How to Ensure Your Marketing is Cost-Effective at All Times

Whether buying or selling leads (or mediating the process as an affiliate network), you need to approach the process comprehensively, comparing identity verification results with metrics like your earnings from different publishers, lead groups, or traffic channels.

Read also: Email Verification to Ensure You Only Get High-Quality Leads

In other words, you need a lead management system like LMS Sync, which will take care of your leads as they’ve passed ID verification and other preliminary screenings you may have in place (for example, checking the lead’s email, IP address, or phone number).

Here are some of the insights you’ll unlock with LMS Sync:

• Campaign data at a glance: The customizable Dashboard tab displays your most essential performance metrics in real-time, including daily revenue, earnings, number of leads sold or purchased, accept rate, and more. Likewise, you can visualise most of the data to better understand how your campaign evolves.
• Granular campaign metrics: The Performance Summary tab displays granular publisher-level performance metrics, including the number of leads posted, sold, rejected, EPL, the percentage of duplicated leads submitted over different time periods, and the number of leads that haven’t passed iClear verification and were rejected.
• Lead details: The Lead Details tab displays information on each lead that is going through your campaigns, including whether the lead is sold, rejected, fresh, or high-quality. The most risky leads are tagged as high-fraud (HF), while those with a low fraud risk are tagged as low-fraud (LF).

As a lead distribution manager – for example, you’re an affiliate network – you can also use our ping tree system and seven lead distribution strategies: price-based, priority-based, weight, parallel pings (higher price), parallel pings (all sold), ping-post, and even distribution.

“With a ping post, a lead is sent into the marketplace in the form of a ping, which means you’re using some level of customer data to ping data into your marketplace in one go, essentially giving all of your advertisers – buyers – the chance to review that customer and decide in real-time whether they want to acquire that customer. Ping post allows for dynamic bidding, so advertisers can bid against each other. In fact, you’re pinging all the data to everyone in one go, essentially saying, “Hey, I have a customer. Do you want this customer?”As for the ping tree, it’s more of a one-by-one routing logic where you’re applying some kind of filtration initially and ranking your list of advertisers or buyers by a priority of some sort, for example, by the price they’re prepared to pay, or you might have an advertiser you’re wanting to send 80% of your traffic or some other prioritization model. For example, you may want to split-test advertisers against each other to equally distribute calls between the two. A ping tree is typically used to have a distribution logic with a little more control than a ping post, with a little bit more deliberation around it.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series

Read also: How to Re-Engage & Close Old Leads

Example: You want to connect purchase-ready leads to the highest-paying advertiser. If so, you can use a price-based lead distribution method, offering leads to the highest bidder. On the other hand, if you want to ensure all buyers within your system get leads, you can apply even lead distribution or weight-based distribution to assign different probabilities to different advertisers.

 

Synergise Lead and Phone Call Verification with Phonexa

For many companies, phone calls are a significant part of their marketing strategy. Notably, phone calls are generally more profitable than web leads, converting up to 50% of the time when connected to the right agent.

Read also: Pay-Per-Call Advertising: Your Best Source of Qualified Leads

So if you’re into phone calls just as much as you are into web leads, Phonexa might be the best lead management environment for you. Unlike most other software solutions that mostly work separately from one another, we’ve coordinated everything a performance marketer might need on one roof – eight solutions to tackle web and phone call campaigns from A to Z.

Specifically for phone calls, you get two major verification features:

Basic Phone Number Validation	Through Basic Phone Number Validation, you can verify the caller’s phone number format, type (e.g., mobile, landline, toll-free, VoIP), region, and country.For example, if the caller’s country on a form differs from the country returned as a result of Basic Phone Number Validation, you may want to choose to block or at least flag such a number for manual verification.
Phone Line Analysis	Through Phone Line Analysis, you can check whether the caller’s phone is switched on, active, and assigned to a specific network.For example, if the caller’s phone is switched off, you might not want to buy this caller until they switch their phone on so you can call them immediately after the purchase.

The synergy of lead and phone call verification is unmatched, especially if you have a system that allows you to use the data across campaigns, including when the same lead becomes a caller and vice versa. Having free data flows within one lead management system is a huge advantage that can increase your traffic quality dramatically and help avoid fraudulent and low-quality leads.

Learn more about phone number verification in this comprehensive guide.

Predictive Modelling to Simulate Marketing Campaigns in a Safe Environment

With Phonexa, one of the best things is that you can use accumulated data to your advantage, continuously improving your marketing campaigns. And the more leads go through your system, the more accurately you can predict what these leads need and how they are going to behave.

Moreover, our predictive modelling software allows you to simulate marketing outcomes by pairing historical data with analytical algorithms. In practice, this means you can run an infinite number of campaigns with various settings before you choose the winners. For example, you can identify which ads and when you should display to what audience to get the most out of your campaign.

 

Your All-in-One Performance Marketing Software Suite

I’ve mentioned this several times already, but I just can’t help it: having all your marketing instruments synchronised is priceless as more and more solutions pop up on the market. Tons of SaaS companies promise very specific results in very specific marketing aspects, but very few take it to the highest strategic level, so you can cover it all with one solution.

Phonexa does it by closing the loopholes between clicks, forms, and conversions. Whether you’re using LMS Sync for web leads, Call Logic for phone calls, or Lynx to track affiliate clicks, you also benefit from data exchanges between these systems as well as accumulated historical insights.

 

Here are the eight proprietary solutions you get at a single price:

Build your plan now, or take a product tour to explore how Phonexa works.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is digital ID verification?

Digital identity verification is essentially checking the lead’s data against internal and external databases in order to confirm their purchase interest and legitimacy. In practice, leads that haven’t passed identity verification can be blocked or flagged for manual revision.

Why do you need identity verification?

Identity verification helps understand what type of leads you’re buying or selling. As a lead seller, you can ensure that you only offer high-quality leads who are likely to convert into sales and maintain your reputation as a reliable traffic source. As a lead buyer, real-time ID verification can help you distinguish between purchase-worthy leads and those that are irrelevant, low-quality, duplicate, or fraudulent.

What specific data can you extract through identity verification?

There are over a dozen different ID and background-related consumer data items you can collect: bankruptcy records, foreclosure records, legal judgment records, criminal history, liens, and more. It’s quite useful when the ID verification software allows you to pick the data you want to verify without forcing you to overpay for checking irrelevant data.