Since the beginning of marketing time, there has been a high correlation between the level of segmentation or specificity of the lead and the price of the lead. The more discrete and specific the list for a given set of leads, the more the marketer spent for each lead. Asking for females in the US was was much less expensive than asking for females between 22-30 who lived in Boston.
The theory behind this seemed logical: the more specific the request, the more likely the result would result in success (eg more sales). With more success, you were likely to pay more. Also, there was an implicit assumption that more work was involved to provide the more specific list.
Like just about everything else on the web, the old rules have been tossed on their head.
In a complete reversal, the correlation is now inverted. When you buy leads on the web, through any of the various methods- cpm, cpc or cpa –, you pay less for each lead the more specific you make your request.
The rartionale – the owner of these web leads is concerned about their return on their cpm’s or the effectiveness of the ad. The fewer impressions it takes to get the user to click on the ad, the less the ad costs to the lead generator, who then passes that on to the buyer. The lead generator wants to limit the number of impressions it tales so as to avoid burning out the user.
So it pays now more than ever to know your demographic.