Lead generation glossary

The share of submitted leads that a buyer accepts. A falling accept rate is usually the earliest warning that traffic quality is slipping or that a buyer has silently tightened their filters.

A lead sold some time after it was generated — days, weeks or months. Prices fall sharply with age, often to a fraction of the real-time price. Useful for nurture campaigns, poor for immediate conversion.

Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation. Governs commercial electronic messages sent to or from Canada. Requires express or implied consent, clear sender identification and a functioning unsubscribe mechanism. The burden of proving consent falls on the sender, and administrative monetary penalties reach $10 million for a business.

The reversal of a supplier's payout when a return is approved. The buyer is credited, the supplier is debited, and the platform reverses its fee.

What a buyer pays for one lead, or what a seller spends generating one. The most commonly quoted metric in lead generation and the most commonly misunderstood, because a low CPL with a poor contact rate is worse than a high CPL with a good one.

A volume ceiling on how many leads a buyer receives in a given period. Protects a sales floor from being overwhelmed, which matters enormously in weather-driven verticals like HVAC and roofing.

Restricting lead delivery to specific days and hours, so leads arrive when a buyer actually has people available to call them.

A single-stage lead sale. The seller posts the complete record and the platform routes it to buyers in order of their standing bid. Simpler than ping/post, and appropriate when prices are fixed by agreement.

Canada's National Do Not Call List, administered by the CRTC. Telemarketers must scrub against it, with limited exemptions. Separate from CASL, which governs electronic messages rather than calls.

Detecting whether the same person has already been submitted within a defined lookback window, usually by matching on email or phone. Prevents a seller being paid twice for the same consumer and a buyer paying twice for one.

A lead sold to exactly one buyer. Costs more per lead but faces no competition, so contact and close rates are typically much higher.

Consent a person actively and knowingly gives — typically by ticking an unchecked box beside disclosure wording. Under CASL it does not expire, but you must be able to prove you obtained it. A pre-checked box is not express consent.

Automated checks applied before a lead enters the auction — email format and deliverability, phone line type and area code, postal code format and its agreement with the stated province. Leads that fail never reach a buyer, so they never become returns.

Consent inferred from an existing business relationship or a conspicuously published business address. Time-limited under CASL, and considerably riskier to rely on than express consent.

Quebec's modernized privacy legislation. Stricter than PIPEDA: it requires explicit consent, French-language rights, a designated privacy officer and privacy impact assessments for certain projects. Applies to anyone handling the personal information of Quebec residents.

An intermediary who coordinates suppliers and buyers without generating traffic themselves, taking a margin on the transaction.

The business purchasing leads — a mortgage broker, insurance advisor, contractor or lender. Sometimes called the customer or advertiser.

A buyer's request to be credited for a lead that failed to meet the agreed specification — a disconnected number, invalid data, a duplicate, or a record outside their filters. A defined return window and a written policy prevent most disputes.

The business generating leads and selling them — through paid search, paid social, SEO, email or other traffic sources. All three terms mean the same thing in practice.

Payment terms under which a buyer settles their invoice within 30 days rather than pre-paying. Common for established buyers, and the main source of the working-capital gap that catches new lead companies.

The ordered list of buyers a ping is offered to. Sometimes called a waterfall when it operates sequentially rather than in parallel.

A two-stage lead sale. The seller first "pings" partial, non-identifying data to multiple buyers, each of whom returns a bid or a pass. The seller then "posts" the full record to whoever bid highest. Ping/post generally earns sellers more than a flat rate because each lead is priced on its actual merits rather than an average.

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act — Canada's federal private-sector privacy law. Requires consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, grants individuals access and deletion rights, and imposes breach reporting obligations.

An automated HTTP notification sent when an event occurs — a lead is sold, returned or rejected. Used to keep external systems synchronised without polling.

A duplicate check performed before a lead is generated or offered. The seller asks whether the platform has already seen a given email or phone number, avoiding the cost of producing a lead nobody will buy.

The share of a seller's leads that find any buyer at all. Sixty-five to eighty percent is typical. Below that, either your filters are too loose or you need more buyers on the campaign.

A lead sold to two or more buyers, usually capped at three or four. Cheaper per lead, but every buyer is calling the same person, so speed to contact decides who wins.

A seller-defined identifier passed with a lead to track which specific traffic source, campaign or creative produced it. Essential for optimisation.

Third-party services that independently certify how and when a consumer submitted a form, producing a verifiable record of the consent event. Widely required by US buyers and increasingly requested in Canada.

The fallback sequence used when a buyer fails to accept a lead. If the highest bidder's endpoint errors, times out or rejects the lead, the platform automatically offers it to the next-highest bidder, and so on down the list.