Opt-in units are the most common types of advertising utilized by the online lead generation advertising. These are ad formats that enable consumers to explicitly opt-in to an advertiser offer without leaving the website on which the ad was displayed.

The most common types of opt-in ad units are:

• Co-registration advertising: The advertiser receives some or all of the standard fields collected by a site during the site's registration process. • Custom co-registration: The advertiser receives the standard fields collected by a site as well as answers to few custom questions – e.g.- Have you traveled overseas in the last six months? • Full Page Lead Generation: The advertiser's offer appears as a full page ad in an HTML format with relevant text and graphics. The advertiser receives the standard fields and answers to as many as twenty custom questions that s/he defines.

Other types of lead generation advertising include:

• White paper syndication: The advertiser offers industry research or a white paper in exchange for user contact information. • Webinars: The advertiser offers online presentations on a particular topic in exchange for user contact information – more commonly found in the b2b world. •Custom editorial sponsorships: The advertisers sponsor a section on the web site. To access the information in the sponsored sections, consumers give advertisers their contact information.

In an economic climate marked by uncertainty, online marketers are increasingly investing a greater amount of their advertising dollars against CPL (Cost per Lead) online lead generation campaigns.

Advertisers pay for impressions in CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions) campaigns. CPC (Cost per Click) campaigns require that advertisers pay for clicks. In either scenario, there are no guarantees that impressions and clicks will convert into qualified leads. In contrast, marketers pay exclusively for leads in a CPL campaign.

On the other hand, the online lead generation market suffers from a lack of openness and transparency caused by the proliferation of third party brokers. In the absence of effective self-regulation, some less than scrupulous marketers have been guilty of deploying spurious incentives to generate leads, a practice that has attracted the wrath of none other than the mighty Federal Trade Commission (FTC). To maximize revenue, many of them utilize questionable practices that include

1. Running offers on less than credible sites (sites that promise free iPods)

2. Presenting irrelevant offers (free iPods for online degrees)

3. Tricking consumers into signing up for multiple offers (unchecked opt-in boxes).

What’s bad for the consumer is bad for the advertiser. The lack of transparency has kept many online marketers away from the booming segment.