Capturing leads, not just clicks

Sometimes a click isn't enough

For e-commerce, a click → checkout → conversion flow makes sense. For B2B SaaS, financial services, or anything with a longer sales cycle, you need to capture the lead first — name, email, qualifier — and let your team close.

Merkle Tree Affiliates has a Lead Capture Form builder that does exactly that, with affiliate attribution baked in.

How it works

You build a custom form inside the portal — drag-and-drop the fields you need (name, email, phone, company, custom dropdowns, etc.).
You drop a one-line embed snippet on your landing page (or use the hosted form URL directly).
When the form is submitted, we record a lead in the platform with the originating affiliate captured automatically (from the tracking cookie / sub-ID).
You can either:
- Treat the lead itself as a CPL conversion (commission paid on form submission), or
- Wait until the lead converts downstream (your sales team marks it as won) and then push a converted-lead event back to us so the commission triggers then.

What you can customize per form

Field types — text, email, phone, dropdown, multi-select, checkbox, textarea.
Required vs optional per field.
Field validation — basic regex on email/phone/URL, custom rules.
Thank-you redirect — send the lead to a custom URL after submit.
Anti-spam — honeypot field + optional Turnstile/hCaptcha (configured by you).
Affiliate visibility — affiliates see the form, the per-form conversion rate, and how their personal traffic is performing on it.

Where this fits

Lead Capture Forms are perfect for:

B2B SaaS — "Book a demo" forms with affiliate attribution.
Financial services / crypto — "Apply for an account" with full KYC handoff.
Education — "Request a brochure" / "Apply for the course" funnels.
High-ticket affiliate offers — anything where you don't sell directly on the landing page.

Reporting

Every lead lands in the Leads tab of the campaign + a per-form analytics view: total submissions, submission → qualified rate, top affiliates by lead volume, and the full lead detail for your sales team to action.

Related reading

New in 2026: lead quality scoring

Capturing leads is the easy part. Knowing which ones are worth your sales team's time is the hard part. We just shipped a lead quality scoring engine so you can answer that question automatically.

For any lead-capture campaign you can:

Define a set of scoring rules ("if budget is over $5,000, add 30 points", "if company size includes 'enterprise', add 50", "if email matches a free-mail domain, subtract 20"). Negative scores are fine.
Set thresholds — low / medium / high buckets — that decide what happens automatically: low-bucket leads can be auto-marked disqualified, high-bucket leads can be auto-marked qualified.
Add tags that get stamped on the lead based on the bucket — useful for filtering and exports.
Optionally POST every scored lead to your CRM via an outbound webhook with an HMAC-signed payload — fire on all leads, just the low bucket, or just the high bucket.

Low-quality leads also fire a real-time alert so your team knows the moment a campaign's lead quality drops.

Lead quality scoring is opt-in per campaign. Configure it from the campaign's Lead Quality page in the advertiser portal — and preview your rules against a sample payload before turning them on.