The following report was originally posted by Aaron Wittersheim, Chief Operating Officer at Straight North, a Chicago-based Internet marketing company. He is an accomplished entrepreneur with more than 20 years of business and technology experience.

You can’t compare apples to oranges if you don’t know which are which in the first place. That’s the situation in which Internet marketers find themselves when they fail to incorporate lead validation into their lead generation campaigns.

Nearly half of all website conversions are things other than sales leads. Without lead validation, marketers lump those in with true sales leads, leaving campaigns to be managed based on incomplete information. Even though lead validation is a time-consuming process, it is essential for ensuring that you have all the information needed to properly optimize your website. The following presentation goes into more detail about what makes lead validation so important.

Check out the report above.