IP Lookup: Paving the Way for Data-Driven Lead Acquisition & Sales

Whether you generate leads for your own business, buy leads from lead generators, or sell leads to companies, knowing the IP address on the lead in question can help you only accept consumers you’re interested in. Or, if you’re selling leads, knowing their IP address, ZIP code, and location can help you qualify (or disqualify) leads to matching companies.

In industries like finance or insurance, lead prices may exceed £100 per lead, making services like IP lookup indispensable for large-scale affiliates, advertisers, and affiliate networks – effectively, anyone who handles a substantial volume of leads or phone calls. Oftentimes, the lead’s IP address alone might be enough to accept, reject, or flag them.

The good news is that you don’t need third-party IP lookup software if you’re using Phonexa. As our client, you’ll get access to the IP Lookup as part of our built-in user verification and fraud prevention solution iClear. Then you can check your leads in real-time with no risk and only decide whether you want to buy or sell them after you’ve verified all essential data.

“Our ethos, our job is to build the most capable software possible and then get out of the way. Build all the features, all the functionality, give our clients pure flexibility, pure control, and fail over redundancy – essentially, build a robust system that is never a thing that hinders our clients.The worst thing in the world is when you scale a brand, you start generating traffic, and then your system or your software is what’s holding you back. So our logic is to build as much functionality as you can under one roof and then get out of the way.”“It’s surprising how many platforms don’t give you that full control – that’s the feedback we hear from a lot of our clients. They just love the fact that whatever they’re trying to achieve, they can do it. That’s what I mean when I say that our goal is to build the best system possible and get out of the way – we don’t want to be there grabbing the headlines and restricting what our clients can do.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series

Take a product tour to see Phonexa’s all-in-one performance marketing software in action.

How Does IP Lookup Work?

At its core, IP lookup is quite simple:

➥ When a user lands on a website or fills out a form – technically, when the user’s device sends a request to the affiliate’s web server to load the webpage or perform a specific action, like submitting a form – their IP address is automatically captured. Then the IP lookup software compares it against external and internal databases.

With Phonexa, IP checks are done automatically. All you have to do is set up which leads you’d like to accept, reject, or flag for manual verification.

Example: If you’re a solar installer in, for example, Manchester, you can use the IP Lookup feature to sieve out leads from irrelevant regions or those using a VPN. Then all leads outside of Manchester and VPN users, even those from Manchester, will be automatically rejected.

For more information on iCLear: IP Lookup, check out the official guidelines.

Can You Identify the Lead’s Exact Location by Their IP Address?

The deepest level you can go is the city-level data – the lead’s postcode, latitude, and longitude. That said, the actual precision depends on the database against which the IP is verified and whether the IP address is static, dynamic, or if the lead uses a VPN or proxy server.

Example: If you’re running a pay-per-call campaign in London, you can use iClear: IP Lookup to accept calls from this area. When the lead submits the form, the software instantly runs their IP address against internal and external databases, which return their country, region, city, postcode, latitude, longitude, ISP, and whether the lead uses a VPN or proxy server.

Here’s what this type of report may look like:

IP Address	81.2.69.192
Country	United Kingdom
Region	England
City	London
Postcode	SW1A 1AA
Latitude	51.5010
Longitude	-0.1419
ISP	BT Broadband
Fraud Indicators	Residential IP

Then, depending on the settings of your lead management software, the system accepts, rejects, or flags the lead for manual verification. However, you shouldn’t necessarily judge the lead by their IP address only – instead, it might be reasonable to factor in all available data from other systems.

Read also: What Is Lead Management? Definition, Process & Benefits

At What Point Does an IP Lookup Happen?

IP lookups may happen a few times for the same lead – for example, after they’ve landed on your website and also after they’ve submitted a form.

Here’s how you can use IP lookup at different stages of the customer journey:

• When a user lands on the website. Once the lead lands on your website, their IP address is instantly tracked and can be used to display the most relevant offers. For example, if you’re mainly targeting London but have gotten a lead from Liverpool, you can redirect them to advertisers or affiliate networks that cover this location.
• When a user clicks a link. Upon an affiliate link or banner click, the lead’s IP address is captured by a tracking pixel or redirect link. Then you can accept and redirect the consumer to an appropriate offer or reject them.
• When a user submits a form. When a user submits a form, you can verify their IP address one more time, which is quite important because their IP address tracked upon landing may not match the IP address tracked upon the form submission. For example, the lead might switch from mobile data to Wi-Fi, turn the VPN on or off, etc.
• When a user initiates a call. Whether a click-to-call button or manual dial, the lead’s geolocation can be tracked with almost 100% accuracy. Then you can accept, decline, or redirect the call to the best internal or external operator.

However, IP lookup is only one of the many verification steps you need to understand marketing patterns; for example, you should also check their email address, phone number, and many more.

Read also: Your Guide to Pay-Per-Lead Marketing in the UK

This is why we offer a comprehensive performance marketing software suite that can cover all your needs without forcing you to switch between systems and reports.

 

Book a demo to learn more about iClear: IP Lookup and how it coordinates with other lead and call tracking features within Phonexa.

Geo from User IP, IP Lookup, and IP Scoring

As a performance marketer, you surely want to pay only for the features you actually use and the depth of tracking your campaigns require. This is why we offer several layers of IP checks so you can choose the scope and depth you need without overpaying.

In addition to IP Lookup, you can also use:

• iClear: Get Geo Info from User IP
• iClear: IP Scoring

iClear: Get Geo Info from User IP

Available at only £0.0005 per ping, iClear: Get Geo Info from User IP is a feature you might go for if you only need to extract the lead’s country, region, and city from their IP address. In some cases, this basic geo data verification may be sufficient, but ultimately, it depends on the type and scope of the campaign you’re running and whether the lead source is verified.

Here’s when you might only need the Get Geo Info from User IP feature:

• You only need initial lead screening. For some campaigns – like if you’re generating lower quality leads – you might only need a basic preliminary check to verify that consumers match the advertiser’s qualification criteria. In this scenario, full-scale IP checking or IP scoring might be excessive, increasing your cost per lead to the point where selling or buying such leads becomes unprofitable.
• You’re buying leads from reliable sources. If the publisher on the other end has proven to generate high-quality traffic, then at some point, you may decide that you don’t want to check their leads thoroughly. If so, a basic geo check would do the job.
• You have strict qualification criteria. In industries with a lower price per lead, you may not even want to go into any further details if the lead’s location is a mismatch.

For more information on iClear: Get Geo Info from User IP, check out the official guidelines.

However, while both iClear: IP Lookup and iClear: Get Geo Info from User IP are great on their own, there can be false positives or false negatives sometimes due to the impossibility of pinpointing the lead’s exact location, especially in smaller cities.

➥ It would be fair to estimate the city-level accuracy at around 85%, with a 20-50 km radius. In practice, this means that if the software identifies 100 leads as being in London, the actual location of 85 of them could be Watford (24 km from central London), Slough (32 km from central London), or Croydon (15 km from central London), while the remaining 15 leads could be located a bit farther.

This is why you might also want to score the lead’s IP address.

iClear: IP Scoring

IP-wise, IP scoring is the most advanced check with iClear, analysing the user’s IP address across over 25 parameters to issue a comprehensive fraud score. As a result, you have a numerical representation of the risk level associated with the IP address in question, and you can set various score thresholds to accept, reject, or flag all incoming or generated leads.

• As an advertiser, you can only accept leads with a fraud score of, say, 50 or higher. At the same time, knowing the average fraud score for every lead source, you can double down on campaigns and publishers that provide high-quality leads and adjust or eliminate campaigns that historically provide low-quality traffic.
• As an affiliate, you can protect your reputation by not submitting leads to advertisers with a fraud score of, say, lower than 50. Likewise, you can investigate the underperforming traffic sources to increase your lead quality.
• As an affiliate network, you can set up a cost-effective lead distribution system, connecting higher-quality leads to the best advertisers and redistributing lower-quality leads among advertisers looking for average-quality traffic. On top of that, you can simply reject leads that don’t pass the minimum qualification score.

Moreover, with iClear, you can be device-specific, setting up different minimum fraud scores for desktop and mobile leads. For example, if your campaign is primarily focused on mobile users, you might want to accept riskier mobile leads and less risky desktop leads.

Here are the most essential parameters factored into a lead’s fraud score:

VPN and Detection	Leads who use a VPN are considered low-quality leads in most industries, including those where the IP address specified on the form mismatches the collected IP address.
Proxy Detection	Using proxy servers is also considered a red flag, especially for geo-focused campaigns and high-ticket and YMYL industries.
Tor Network Detection	Tor networks are usually used as an ultimate anonymisation layer for users who want to remain private at all costs.
Geolocation Mismatch	Mismatches between the submitted and IP-derived location, time zones, and language settings make leads look suspicious and devalue them.
ISP Information	Residential IP addresses typically indicate a genuine lead, whereas cloud and hosting IPs are often associated with bots, proxy servers, and fraud.
Device Type and OS Fingerprinting	Creating a lead’s fingerprint helps with cross-channel tracking, even if the lead changes the IP address or clears cookies.

For every incoming or submitted lead, you get a fraud score that encompasses all 25 risk factors, so you don’t need to analyse them separately. That said, you can assign different weights to some factors, depending on the campaign.

For more information on iClear: IP Scoring, check out the official guidelines.

 

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Checks

For most services with iClear, you can execute them in real-time before the purchase (synchronous check), in parallel with the purchase (asynchronous check), or on demand:

• Synchronous IP checks are recommended for campaigns where you don’t want to accept all leads by default but have specific filters to sieve out mismatched leads. Synchronous IP checks are usually the default model, but they may take some time until the database responds to the query. For high-volume campaigns, this latency might slow down the workflow and prevent you from buying the leads you’d like, especially if you’re purchasing shared leads that are very time-sensitive sales-wise.
• Asynchronous IP checks do not stop lead processing – the system accepts the lead while also sending the query to the external database – and are therefore recommended for analytical purposes. For example, you can check incoming leads from various publishers to volume for traffic sources that historically perform well.
• On-demand IP checks are triggered by specific conditions or predefined rules, such as high-risk or duplicate leads. On-demand checks offer the most flexibility, as you can control your budget by verifying only particular leads.

Book a demo with Phonexa professionals to uncover all the ins and outs of IP checks.

Is It Worth Checking All Leads’ IP Addresses?

For most iClear services, including IP checks, you can choose to verify a specific percentage of leads rather than all of them. In many scenarios, this makes perfect sense; for example, if you’re working with time-tested affiliates, or if you’re on a budget.

If you’re running several affiliate marketing campaigns, you can increase the percentage of leads to look up for new traffic sources and high-ticket offers while only applying rare random checks (like 5% of leads to look up) for traffic coming from long-term partners.

Your All-in-One Performance Marketing Software Suite for Leads and Phone Calls

From looking up the IP addresses of your leads to hundreds of other performance marketing aspects, Phonexa’s all-in-one software suite covers it all, providing you with a granular view of every interaction across every touchpoint, both leads and phone calls.

“At Phonexa, we’re seeing the most success where clients are building hybrids. In other words, they’re allowing the consumer to buy their products the way they want to buy them, and that is what we’re trying to promote all the time with Phonexa. Take those warm consumers out of the marketplace as quickly as you can and track them as granularly as you can so you can go and spend the money back on the things that are encouraging those positive conversion metrics.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series

Some other companies do it as well, but we’ve got a unique advantage: With Phonexa, you get everything you need under one roof – one comprehensive dashboard – so you don’t have to juggle solutions and reports in order to streamline your business. All collected data are always at your fingertips, and you’re in charge of it at all times, never losing the forest for the trees.

 

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

Build your plan now, or take a product tour to see Phonexa in action.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I look up an IP address with iClear?

As a client with Phonexa, you get default access to the iClear: IP Lookup features, which you can use to analyse the IP addresses of the generated leads or the leads you buy. In practice, this means you ask your lead management system within Phonexa to check IP addresses for, for example, offered leads – all of them or a specific percentage of leads chosen randomly – and also set the qualification criteria for the leads you’d like to accept, reject, or flag.

For more information, check out the official iClear: IP Lookup guideline.

What does iClear’s IP lookup show in addition to the lead’s IP address?

In addition to the lead’s IP address, you can check the lead’s country, region, city, postcode, latitude, longitude, and ZIP code. Knowing this geographical data, you can decide whether you want to buy or sell the lead. For example, if you’re acquiring home services or solar installation leads, you might only want to buy consumers from the regions where you have on-site teams.

Can I do an IP lookup before buying the lead?

Absolutely. One of the primary purposes of IP Lookup with iClear is to verify the lead’s address in real-time, so you can filter out irrelevant, low-quality, and fraudulent traffic. Whether you’re buying or selling leads, real-time IP Lookup can help you get the best deals in the market.