Jyoti Kalra

Picture this: The marketing team proudly delivers a new batch of leads, convinced that these prospects are primed for conversion. Meanwhile, the call center team rolls its eyes once again, they’re fielding complaints from uninterested or unqualified contacts. Frustration rises, fingers are pointed, and the age-old question resurfaces: Who’s responsible when leads don’t convert—marketing or the call center?  This debate often boils down to one critical issue: junk leads. While the marketing team may generate impressive volumes of leads, not all are created equal. Junk leads—those unqualified, uninterested, or even fraudulent frequently sneak into the funnel, wasting time, resources, and ultimately, opportunities for both teams. In this article, we explore the “real reason” behind this endless marketing vs. call center debate, emphasizing how a continuous filtering system can align both teams, save time, and improve results.  The Junk Lead Challenge: Why Leads Aren’t Always What They Seem  On the surface, a lead might appear promising. It might tick the right boxes in terms of basic demographics or initial engagement. However, a closer look reveals that not all leads are created equal. Junk leads are often generated through non-intent-driven clicks impertinent, low-quality traffic sources, or unverified information. These leads lack genuine interest and intent to buy, leading to a series of issues that drive the marketing and call center divide:  Marketing’s Perspective: “We Hit Our Numbers”  Marketing’s goal is often centered on generating high lead volumes. Performance is measured by metrics like click-through rates, form submissions, and lead counts, creating pressure to hit targets. However, these numbers can sometimes reflect quantity over quality, as invalid clicks and junk leads skew results.  Call Center’s Perspective: “We’re Wasting Our Time”  The call center team deals with these leads firsthand, engaging in time-consuming follow-ups only to find disinterested, unreachable, or unqualified contacts. For call center agents, these engagements lead to burnout and frustration, impacting their morale and effectiveness.  This disconnects between the two teams not only impacts productivity but also consumes valuable resources. For a business focused on conversion and growth, the junk lead issue becomes a costly barrier, resulting in wasted time, reduced efficiency, and strained internal relationships across departments.  The Hidden Impact of Junk Leads  Junk leads are more than just data in the CRM; they create a cycle of wasted efforts for both teams:  -Lost Time on Unproductive Calls: Call center agents spend precious time on leads that lack any genuine interest in the product, draining their morale and productivity. It’s frustrating for agents to encounter frequent rejections, impacting their motivation and performance.  -Strain on Marketing Resources: For marketing, the push for high numbers of leads can come at the expense of quality. Campaigns are evaluated on how many leads they generate, even if many are unlikely to convert. This can lead to a misplaced focus on quantity over quality, which ultimately fails both teams.  -Unmet Conversion Goals: For both marketing and the call center, junk leads directly affect the bottom line. Marketing sees low ROI on its campaigns, and the call center fails to hit conversion targets. In the end, this hurts the business by diverting resources from potential sales opportunities to unqualified leads.  Focus on Lead Quality Over Lead Quantity  To resolve the marketing-call center debate, it’s essential to shift the focus from sheer lead volume to lead quality. By implementing more rigorous lead qualification and filtering practices, companies can prevent junk leads from clogging the sales pipeline. Here’s how:  –Establish Clear Lead Qualification Criteria The first step in aligning both teams is to set clear standards for what defines a “qualified lead.” This could include factors like purchase intent, behavior on the site, engagement with marketing content, and demographic relevance. By standardizing these criteria, marketing can better identify high-potential leads before they’re sent to the call center, ensuring agents aren’t left cold-calling uninterested contacts.   -Leverage Behavioral Data for Better Lead Insights  With digital tools, marketing can capture and analyze data on each lead’s behavior—such as time spent on key pages, interaction with offers, and responses to email campaigns. Leads showing high levels of engagement signal a stronger interest and are more likely to convert. Sharing this behavioral data with the call center gives agents deeper context, helping them prioritize leads more effectively.  -Segment and Score Leads Before Hand-Off  Segmentation and lead scoring can transform a CRM from a dumping ground of all leads into a well-organized system that prioritizes quality over quantity. With segmentation, marketing can assign different levels of interest to leads, grouping them by their likelihood to convert based on factors like recent interactions, browsing patterns, and demographic fit. Lead scoring, on the other hand, uses these criteria to rate each lead’s conversion potential, making it clear which leads warrant follow-up.  –Optimize Follow-Up Process for Different Lead Types  Once leads have been segmented, the call center can adjust its follow-up process based on each group’s engagement level. For instance, leads with high engagement scores can be prioritized for immediate, frequent follow-ups, while lower-scoring leads might benefit from a more gradual approach or even additional nurturing from marketing before being passed to sales. This ensures that agents are spending their time where it’s most likely to yield results.  -Implement Continuous Feedback Loops  To maintain alignment, marketing and the call center need open lines of communication. A continuous feedback loop allows the call center to provide insights on lead quality back to marketing, helping refine future campaigns. Over time, this feedback can guide marketing’s strategies to target more qualified leads, improving the overall quality of leads entering the funnel.  How mFilterIt can help marketers remove junk leads?    mFilterIt’s  Ad fraud solution empowers advertisers by collecting and analyzing crucial data—such as website behavior, CRM inputs, and conversion metrics—through advanced AI & ML algorithms. The system’s proprietary rule engine scores lead based on user intent (high, moderate, or low), helping advertisers swiftly identify and filter out junk leads. This enables sales teams to focus on quality prospects, improving efficiency and conversion rates. With mFilterIt’s analytics-driven approach, advertisers gain actionable

For digital marketers, walled garden is not a foreign word. However, we will take a quick minute to throw light on it.   Walled gardens is a term coined in digital marketing for closed advertising environment where all the operations are controlled by the ecosystem provider. Some of the major players ruling this landscape are Google, Meta, and Amazon. They offer the advertisers access to a large set of audiences and comprehensive data analytics.  Due to the nature of walled gardens, these platforms are often perceived to be a protected space for advertisers. This means that the traffic is assumed to be high quality.   However, reality is not exactly black and white. It is grey.   Let’s find out.   The Myth is – Walled Gardens don’t have bot traffic   When advertising on walled gardens, the advertisers often perceive that their ads are receiving filtered traffic, due to the close nature of the walled garden ecosystem.   The walled gardens claim robust proprietary technologies and algorithms that filter out suspicious or bot-driven activity, leading advertisers to believe these environments are more secure.   However, this “black box” approach also means that advertisers must trust the platform’s own reporting and assurances. Independent verification is limited, so advertisers often accept the platforms’ claims at face value. The perception of reduced bot traffic is partly an outcome of this reliance on self-reported data, alongside platforms’ reputations and massive resources dedicated to tech infrastructure and security. These walled gardens can detect and safeguard from general invalid traffic, however the bots have also become sophisticated over the years. Its ability to mimic human behavior makes it easy to bypass basic rule-based checks. Due to opaque reporting, the advertisers are unaware of the quality of their ad traffic and who is watching their ads. Sophisticated Bots penetrate walled gardens  Sophisticated bots are designed by fraudsters to mimic human behavior in ways that they can mask their movements to evade detection. These bots are capable of taking actions like clicking, scrolling, and even fill forms, which makes it difficult to identify then and differentiate from real users.   These sophisticated bots can even adapt with platform-specific platforms, adjusting their patterns to avoid suspicion. As walled gardens restrict access to third-party ad fraud detection solution, resulting in limited visibility and transparency for advertisers, these bots use this opportunity. Signs of a Sophisticated bot activity   Repetitive visits from a single device  In this case, visits came repeatedly from a single device in a short span of time, indicating abnormal traffic.    Multiple visits in short time span from a single device  In this case, the visits are coming in a short time from the same device fingerprinting, indicating a bot traffic.  Impersonation of a specific device   In this case, the fraudsters impersonate the identity of a specific device. This technique is used by fraudulent affiliates to exhaust the ad budget. Due to this no event (lead/purchases) come from this device. In this case, the visits are coming from a single device, where the user agent at client and server are different, indicating abnormal behaviour.     Partner with an ad fraud validation tool for walled Garden  No platform is immune to bot traffic, including walled gardens. To get full transparency of their ad traffic, advertisers need an advanced solution that can identify sophisticated bots patterns effectively and block them proactively.   The benefit of blocking bot traffic is not limited to clean traffic, but it also helps to improve conversion rate of the ad campaigns. To ensure that the sophisticated bot traffic doesn’t bypass the detection methods, we at mFilterIt use a full-funnel approach along with identifying device signals, behavioral and heuristic checks.   Unlike traditional ad fraud solution vendors, mFilterIt goes beyond the impressions and clicks level to identify sophisticated bot traffic. Our solution detects suspicious traffic at the visit level where more sophisticated patterns can be detected and blocked.   Therefore, protection at just the impression and click level is not enough. Advertisers have to look beyond that to ensure their campaigns on walled gardens are protected from bot traffic.   How did an automobile player improved their conversion rate using Valid8 by mFilterIt?   The major automobile player was running Google search campaigns to bring traffic to their website from various meta platforms. But despite substantial spending, the conversion rate was suspiciously low. Upon identifying suspicious ad traffic patterns, we started the blacklisting process. This resulted in cleaner clicks and lead, improved conversion rate and a savings of $0.47 million for the brand.   Refer to the images below to see the results:   A 13% drop in click fraud and 11% drop in lead fraud rates  A 1.75x increase in conversion ratio  Start Blocking Bot Traffic on Walled Gardens   While walled gardens are trusted for their controlled and secure environment, the reality is that they are not bot-free. To protect ad campaigns from the sophisticated patterns of bot, the advertisers need an additional layer of protection by partnering with ad fraud detection vendor with advanced technology to ensure their ad budgets are consumed to attract genuine audience instead of bots. As bots continue to evolve, advertisers need transparency to evaluate where their ads are shown and who is watching their ads to better assess the quality of their ad traffic and maintain campaign integrity. Get in touch with us today to see how Valid8 by mFilterIt can help you uncover and eliminate hidden fraud in your walled garden campaigns.

Imagine a bucket with a small but constant leak. You pour water daily, yet the water level barely rises. Running lead campaigns with junk leads in your CRM is similar.   You’re investing resources, yet the actual value doesn’t grow. Junk leads, like leaks, waste resources, and hold back growth, leaving your team stretched and chasing unqualified prospects.  For a digital brand investing heavily, the pain point is clear: valuable marketing and call center resources are wasted on unproductive leads, reducing campaign efficiency and conversion rates. One of the sure-fire methods is lead punching used by fraudulent publishers to get money out of advertisers.   The only catch here is – Lead punching only helps these publishers get money, the advertisers are only left with false, or junk leads.   What is Lead Punching? Lead punching is one of the fraudulent practices used by dishonest publishers or affiliates to deliberately submit false lead information, using real names, phone numbers and email ID of a person. This information is easily accessible across multiple sources at a minimal cost, which makes it easy for fraudsters to exploit. They use this data to fill out lead forms, ensuring the details appear legitimate.   However, in reality the real person is not aware of filling in the lead form or even having interest in the service. Therefore, when the sales team follows up, these supposed leads deny submitting any form or even knowing about the company.    This forms easily 30-40% of the total leads which a typical client receives. So not only is the advertiser losing media budget by paying for these junk leads, but they also end up burning call center costs in calling up these leads. Marketing teams also add these leads into a CRM and do Email / WhatsApp marketing on these. Now they waste further money in reaching people who have no interest in their products.   Many advertisers try to implement CAPTCHAs and OTP to prevent bot-driven leads. However, these techniques can also be bypassed. Using disposable phone numbers, OTPs can be bypassed. There are also Captcha solvers available at just one click.  Therefore, implementing these checks cannot guarantee clean leads.   How does it impact CRM health?   – You waste marketing spend on irrelevant leads When marketing budgets drive unqualified traffic, a significant chunk of that spend is essentially wasted. Over time, these costs add up, creating a heavy financial toll on lead generation campaigns that fall short of delivering qualified prospects.  – Your call center team spends time calling irresponsive and irrelevant leads Junk leads consume precious time, especially for call center teams and sales representatives. Every call, follow-up, and email sent to an unqualified lead diverts resources from real prospects, reducing the efficiency and morale of your team.  – You miss the 5-minute rule According to this rule, the chances to connect with a prospect increases 100 times when connected within 5 minutes instead of waiting for an hour.  With resources tied up on low-quality leads, high-potential prospects might get lost due to delayed follow-ups or overlooked engagement. Junk leads indirectly lead to missed revenue opportunities by diverting the attention of your team.  – Your brand name loses credibility Repeatedly reaching out to leads who lack interest can be a poor reflection on your brand. In some cases, it may even create negative associations if potential customers perceive your company as inattentive or misaligned with their needs.  Strategies to Eliminate Junk Leads and Focus on Quality  Taking control of your lead quality requires a well-structured approach, integrating technology and a clear strategy at each step of the funnel. Here’s a roadmap to clean up your lead pipeline and prioritize high-value prospects.  1. Clean Traffic and Fraud Prevention  Start by eliminating invalid traffic sources and preventing fraud with real-time validation tools. Filtering out traffic that doesn’t meet quality standards early on ensures that only leads with genuine potential enter the funnel. By removing these invalid visits at the start, you create a cleaner foundation, setting the stage for more effective lead nurturing and conversion efforts.  2. Intent-Based Visit Analysis  Once you’ve ensured traffic quality, dive deeper by analyzing the intent behind each lead’s visit. Look at the behavior of leads on your website—time spent, pages visited, and actions taken. This stage is crucial for gauging how interesting a lead truly is. Intent-based analysis lets you sort out window-shoppers from those genuinely interested in your product or service, allowing your team to prioritize leads that show clear signs of potential.  3. Lead Scoring and Validation with CRM Integration  For an optimized lead funnel, integrate your CRM with automated lead scoring tools that assess demographic data, engagement level, and previous behavior. Leveraging AI and ML-based technology, you can assign scores to leads based on these criteria, making it easy to prioritize high-potential leads. With a streamlined CRM, your sales team can focus their follow-ups on leads more likely to convert, saving time and increasing productivity.  4. Funnel Optimization and Junk Lead Filtering  With a system in place to identify quality leads, refine your funnel by regularly reviewing and tweaking the criteria that classify leads. By tightening filters and adjusting scoring parameters, you can progressively reduce the entry of junk leads, creating a cycle of continuous improvement in lead quality.  How mFilterIt validate leads on the CRM?   mFilterIt’s solution empowers advertisers with transparent, data-driven insights into CRM data. By collecting key metrics—such as website behavior, sales funnel, revenue, and attribution data—this mechanism uses advanced AI & ML algorithms to analyze each lead’s journey. The unique rule engine provides in-depth conversation and attribution analytics, categorizing users by intent (high, moderate, or low). This user-intent scoring, combined with visit analytics, gives advertisers clarity on lead quality and helps optimize campaign efforts. The solution enables brands to focus on high-intent leads, ensuring accurate reporting and maximizing ROI from their CRM data.  Clean Your CRM with Advanced Technology  For marketers, the focus shouldn’t just be on generating leads but on ensuring the quality of each one. By investing in