Predictive Lead Scoring: How to Make Sure You Buy The Leads You Need

Whether you’re an advertiser or affiliate network, you surely want to maximize the conversion potential of your leads while paying the lowest possible price for them. In this regard, predictive lead scoring may be your best technology, enabling a data-driven assessment of the value of a specific lead based on their demographics, firmographics, psychographics, and other relevant parameters.

At its core, predictive lead scoring is quite simple: the algorithm evaluates incoming leads against historical records and scores them based on the likelihood of a sale. And then you can set up your lead acquisition software – like Phonexa’s LMS Sync, which powers both Ping Post Calls 2.0 and Ping Tree functionalities – to only buy purchase-ready leads. 

If you’re an affiliate network, predictive lead scoring can also be a game-changer, enabling informed lead matching and therefore more sales and commissions. Likewise, partner businesses will have trust in the leads they’re buying and won’t have to run software on their own.

You’re already seeing initial use cases of data analytics and predictive capabilities start to emerge. Attribution gets stronger as a result of that, and then predicting outcomes becomes more methodical than I think it was in the past. – Talar Malakian, from the Lead Gen HQ podcast

Read on to learn how predictive lead scoring works under two popular scenarios:

• You’re an affiliate network that uses predictive lead scoring for lead distribution
• You’re an advertiser who uses your own predictive lead scoring system

Book a demo to learn how Phonexa can help advertisers and affiliate networks improve lead acquisition and sales through in-depth lead insights.

Scenario 1: You’re an Affiliate Network that uses Predictive Lead Scoring for Lead Routing

As an affiliate network, you can enable predictive lead scoring with software like Phonexa’s LMS Sync for web leads and Ping Post Calls 2.0 for phone calls, delivering high-quality leads to matching buyers.

And that’s a win-win for both you, an affiliate network, and your lead buyers:

• You maximize commissions from the leads going through your network and get insights into these leads, which also means you can protect advertisers from fraudulent, mismatched, and low-quality leads
• Leads buyers (businesses purchasing leads through your network) trust the quality and the price of the leads they receive, a great reputational advantage

Below is a step-by-step guide on how predictive lead scoring works:

Step 1. You Collect Lead Data

As an affiliate network, you may run a few to a few hundred various affiliate programs, each with its own set of requirements, including different lead qualification criteria. For every publisher that joins your network, you provide integration instructions – API keys, webhook URLs, S2S posts, or batch uploads – to connect their systems to LMS Sync. 

Next, in LMS Sync, you specify data sources, such as web forms, ad campaigns, calls via Call Logic, or third-party providers, and map each source to specific campaigns or verticals (e.g., insurance, finance, home services, solar).

For example, if you’ve provided a publisher with an API endpoint (like https://lms-sync.phonexa.com/api/lead) and a API key, they may send lead data in real-time as a JSON payload – like { “name”: “John Doe”, “zip”: “90210”, “source”: “PPC” } – when a user submits a form.

To ensure consistency, you should specify the expected data fields in LMS Sync (lead ID, name, email, phone numbers, address, behavioral data, metadata, etc.) and map these data fields to LMS Sync’s internal schema (for example, the publisher’s “postal_code” may map to LMS Sync’s “zip”).

Last but not least, you set up LMS Sync to validate incoming data, blocking irrelevant, low-quality, duplicate, and fraudulent leads based on data such as email addresses or phone numbers. For example, you can block or flag multiple submissions from the same IP address if they’re coming in a short time, wrong phone number formats, etc.

So here’s the data you can collect with LMS Sync:

Demographics	Age, location, income, job title, etc.
Firmographics (B2B)	Company size, industry, annual revenue, etc.
Lead Behavior	Website visits, form submissions, email opens, call duration, etc.
Lead Source	Affiliate ID, campaign type (PPC, organic, social media) and channel
Transactional Data	Purchase history, cart activity, prior inquiries
Third-Party Data	Data from third-party providers with tools like ValidRecord

As an affiliate network, your job is to onboard reliable affiliates, make sure the data ingestion settings in LMS Sync reflect the needs of your buyers, and protect them from fraud.

Step 2. You Optimize Campaigns using Phonexa’s Lead Analytics Software

To build a lead scoring model with LMS Sync, you should define rules and weights for every bit of lead data you’ve collected. Depending on the advertiser’s needs and wants, you can assign points to more valuable parameters or fewer points to less valuable parameters.

For example, if you prioritize location over engagement and lead source, you can assign 50% of the value to the former, while evenly distributing the remaining 50% between the latter two parameters. Phonexa’s lead analytics software is of great help with lead scoring, providing you with Traffic Flow Reports, Comparison Reports, and Filter Analyzer, all aimed at realizing your revenue potential.

Knowing your acceptance rates, complaint rates, revenue per lead, and profit margin by traffic source, vertical, and time – all enabled by Phonexa’s lead analytic software – you can identify which lead attributes correlate with successful campaigns and which aren’t very representative.

Book a demo to learn more about how lead analytics can help you acquire or sell more leads.

Step 3. You Distribute Leads Based on Their Score

Finally, you set up your best lead distribution logic based on lead scores and factors such as agent availability, agent performance, and real-time data provided by call leads. For instance, you can route purchase-ready leads to your highest-paying buyers, or you can develop a more complex distribution architecture that factors in the lead’s location, source, language, income, etc. 

The lead distribution itself is executed using Phonexa’s Ping Tree (web leads) or Ping Post Calls 2.0 (phone calls) system. It’s worth noting that Ping Tree and Ping Post aren’t separate systems but rather phases of a single lead distribution system:

• “Ping” means the provision of partial lead data so the advertiser can decide whether to make a bid for this lead
• “Post” means the provision of the full set of lead data after the lead is sold to the advertiser

So here’s how you can sell web leads with LMS Sync:

1. Lead fills out the form, and LMS Sync collects the lead data
2. The system sends a ping – lead’s ZIP code, age, product interest, etc., to one or several buyers sequentially or simultaneously, depending on the configuration of the ping tree, which is Phonexa’s priority or rule-based ranking of advertisers.
3. The buyer who wins the bid gets the full post (complete lead data). If the lead is rejected, it can be passed to the next buyer in the line or an external network.

With phone calls sold through Phonexa’s Ping Post Calls 2.0, the sales process is the same, except that calls are connected to winning buyers in real-time. For both advertisers and affiliates, Ping Post Calls 2.0 offers equal access to dynamic pricing, bidding structures, selling durations, and dynamic buyer phone numbers, providing them with a new level of control over lead sales.

 

Scenario 2: You’re an Advertiser Who Uses Your Own Predictive Lead Scoring System

If you run multiple affiliate campaigns, acquire large lead volumes, or sell multiple products through multiple sales teams, you may want to run your own lead scoring system for better control and to avoid paying commissions to an affiliate network.

Technically, nothing changes, except that what’s been done by an affiliate network is now managed by you through Phonexa’s software. The other difference is that affiliate networks with a vast pool of buyers may accept a wide range of leads, while you, as a business, may have more stringent acceptance requirements and may struggle to find the right affiliates. 

Read also: Affiliate Network vs. Your Own Affiliate Program: The Hard Choice

But then again, it all depends on the scale and the resources you have.

Predictive Modeling Software to Take the Trial & Error Out of Your Campaigns

While real-time lead scoring helps you distribute leads most effectively, you can take it one step further with Phonexa’s predictive modeling software, which analyzes all accumulated historical data to predict which campaigns are likely to succeed.

In practice, predictive modeling software allows you to run computer simulations with different variables – an unlimited number of simulations with absolutely no risk – until you’ve identified the best-performing lead acquisition campaign. Then you know which campaigns, affiliates, or traffic sources to focus on, your safest expansion and scaling options, and more.

 

Unlock Deep Insights into the Leads You Buy or Sell with Phonexa

Whether you’re a lead buyer or an affiliate network, you can grow your bottom line exponentially over time by continuously improving your lead acquisition or sales campaigns based on real-time and historical lead data and behavior patterns. And that’s where Phonexa shines, a comprehensive eight-in-one performance marketing software suite that covers affiliate, referral, phone call, email, and social media campaigns from top to bottom.

The best thing? It’s all under one roof, so you don’t need to juggle systems and reports. One single dashboard provides both a bird’s-eye view of your marketing progress and granular insights into different campaigns. You’re in full control of your lead flows at all times.

“We have the ability to track everything from first impression when that customer first enters the marketplace all the way through to final conversion, and we also help to bring them back again later and keep them using your service. – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series

 

Here are the eight proprietary solutions you get at a single price (online price calculator):

 

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

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a lead score?

The lead score is a numerical value that indicates the likelihood of a lead converting into a sale, ranging from 0 to 100, with 100 corresponding to the highest conversion probability. However, a lead score of 100 doesn’t mean a 100% probability of a sale – it just means that the lead perfectly matches your ideal customer profile (ICP) according to your scoring system.

How do you calculate a lead score?

To calculate a lead score, you have to identify lead scoring criteria – both demographic (location, industry, company size, income level, etc.) and behavioral (website visits, clicks, downloads, etc.) – attribute a score to each factor based on its importance, and calculate a total lead score.

Predictive lead scoring software automates all the mentioned tasks while evaluating real-time lead data and historical performance. Unlike manual lead scoring, automated lead scoring can adapt over time as you accumulate lead data.

What is the closing probability?

Closing probability is the same as conversion probability – how likely a lead is to convert into a sale. For example, a lead scored 92 out of 100 might have a closing probability of 80% – not 92% – because not all 100-point leads convert into sales.

The closing probability is calculated based on the lead score and historical data. For example, software can pull historical data from your CRM or lead management platform, identify lead patterns, and assign different values to each data item depending on how strongly it predicts a sale. This trained model can then make a data-driven guess on the sales probability value, ranging from 0% to 100%.