Every business running paid search or display advertising assumes a certain amount of waste is normal. Some clicks will not convert. That is the nature of advertising. But there is a category of waste that most businesses underestimate badly, because it is specifically designed to look like legitimate traffic. Click fraud and invalid traffic are...Read More

Choosing a performance marketing partner is, in many ways, similar to hiring a key employee. The relationship is going to significantly influence your growth, your compliance exposure, and your reputation with consumers. And yet most businesses spend far less time vetting a marketing partner than they would vetting a senior hire. Here are the questions...Read More

Every business, at some point, finds a marketing channel that works. It generates results, the cost per outcome feels reasonable, and it becomes the primary — sometimes the only — engine of growth. That feels like success. It is also, quietly, a significant business risk. Recent research on customer acquisition cost across channels shows just...Read More

In performance marketing, the words “lead,” “qualified lead,” and “appointment” get used loosely, sometimes interchangeably. That looseness causes real problems, because these terms describe fundamentally different levels of value, and pricing or evaluating a marketing partnership without understanding the distinction can lead to significant misalignment between expectations and results. A lead, in its most basic...Read More

A common assumption among businesses evaluating a marketing or contact center partner is that strong general marketing capability translates across industries. If a partner can generate results for one type of business, the thinking goes, they can generate similar results for another. That assumption breaks down quickly once you look at how differently regulated, how...Read More

Every seasonal business knows the pattern. Demand is manageable for most of the year, and then, predictably, it spikes — open enrollment for schools and insurers, storm season for home-services companies, tax season for financial professionals, the holidays for retail. And every year, the same problem resurfaces: the team that comfortably handles year-round call volume...Read More

Automated phone systems have a real and valid place in customer service. For simple, routine tasks — checking a balance, confirming a store’s hours, routing a call to the right department — an IVR system can be efficient, cost-effective, and entirely adequate for what the caller needs. But there is a specific moment where IVR...Read More

Speed matters. Answering quickly, responding fast, connecting a prospect while their interest is still high — all of that is foundational to good customer engagement. But speed alone is not the whole story, and businesses that optimize only for how fast they respond can still fail their customers in a way that undermines everything the...Read More

Most businesses think of compliance recordkeeping as something their legal team handles in the background — a checkbox, a filing cabinet, a task that only matters if something goes wrong. That framing significantly understates both the requirement and the risk. Under the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule, telemarketers and sellers are required to keep records of...Read More

If your business buys leads or works with a marketing partner who generates consumer contacts on your behalf, there is a piece of regulatory history from the past two years that you need to understand — because the liability for how those leads were sourced generally falls on you, not your vendor. In 2023, the...Read More