The IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) has been busy further qualifying and quantifying the efforts of the digital marketing industry, recently releasing an in depth study into the performance marketing sector in the UK.

Comprising both affiliate marketing and lead generation, this sub sector of the marketing world accounted for an incredible £814 million of marketing spend in 2012. Perhaps more exciting though is how the research has quantified the bottom line impact of these techniques for the first time. The report tells us that £11 in sales is now being generated for every £1 spent on performance marketing, equating to a total £9 billion sales across the year.

We’ve noted, and written before, about how the value of lead generation is not being fully appreciated within the marketing world – or indeed in the studies conducted about its purpose and potential – so it’s superb that the figures are now starting to tally with our own experience. Spend on lead generation alone in 2012 was calculated at £114 million and we expect this to rise further each year.

Following affiliate4u’s excellent analysis of the affiliate side of things, they asked us to take a closer look at the lead generation intelligence coming out of the report, which of course we were very happy to do! Take a look at our analysis here, and read up on the report over on the IAB website.