lead gen – ADOTAT

2017-04-09

Cost Per Lead Generation Coming to LinkedIn

LinkedIn has announced that they will be offering advertisers a new option, which they are calling LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. The ad product will allow marketers to collect high quality leads from those on the employment based social network.

LinkedIn says that these ads will provide, “high-quality leads from your Sponsored Content campaigns by removing the main barrier to mobile conversion: making someone complete a clunky contact form on a smartphone.” Making it easier for interested viewers to fill out their information is essential when targeting a highly mobile audience, such as the one that uses LinkedIn.

This professional social network boasts more than 500 million users, and they have been working on improving the advertising options so they can raise their bottom line for the past several years. Offering marketers the ability to generate high quality leads directly within the social network seems to have a lot of potential.

Marketers will benefit from all the data that LinkedIn has on their users, which includes an often comprehensive job history, career goals, job skills, and much more. LinkedIn can potentially supply this data with the lead (with user permission of course), so the marketers can use it for sales or other efforts.

2016-09-062016-09-06

ITT Tech Shutting Down, All Affiliate Earnings Lost?

ITT Technical Institute is shutting down all campuses after the U.S. Department of Education banned it from enrolling new students who use federal financial aid.

ITT Educational Services owns and operates more than 130 for-profit vocational colleges nationwide

“The actions of and sanctions from the U.S. Department of Education have forced us to cease operations of the ITT Technical Institutes, and we will not be offering our September quarter,” the company said in a statement. “We reached this decision only after having exhausted the exploration of alternatives, including transfer of the schools to a non-profit or public institution.”

The Carmel, Indiana-based company said Tuesday that hundreds of thousands of current students and alumni and more than 8,000 employees will be affected.

“Our focus and priority with our remaining staff is on helping the tens of thousands of unexpectedly displaced students with their records and future educational options,” the company said in the statement.

The government annually doles out more than $100 billion in loans and grants to students. Colleges rarely face any consequences if their students fail to graduate or subsequently default on their debt. But an increasing array of allegations that ITT misled students about its success at placing graduates in their fields and defrauded investors — the company faces pending lawsuits from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Massachusetts attorney general — led the Education Department to restrict the company’s access to taxpayer funds. ITT has denied the allegations.

ITT Tech had one of the most complex affiliate and lead generation programs in the industry, and most affiliates and publishers have reported that they have not been paid. ITT Tech hasn’t returned calls regarding payment, but the sudden shutting down of the company is not a good sign

ITT Tech stopped enrolling new students on Aug. 29.

2012-04-05

Is Lead Gen a Zero Sum Game?

Online lead generation is thriving. There are now publicly traded lead gen companies, like Quinstreet (valued at almost $500M) and BankRate (valued at $2.4B); a bi-coastal conference – LeadsCon – that now attracts almost 3000 people per conference and was recently acquired in a ‘huge buyout’; and even a silly LinkedIn group that I founded five years ago now has 39,000 members interested in online lead gen!

In sum, lead gen is no longer the ugly step-sister that no one wants to talk about – it’s an established, multi-billion dollar industry that is an integral part of marketing for many, many businesses. Ironically, however, the success of the industry may not be a good thing for most lead sellers. The maturity of the industry is making it harder and harder for “the little guy” to compete in lead gen.

As I see it, lead gen has become a “zero sum” game – as the big players get bigger, they take away opportunities for the small players, until eventually, only the biggest players in each vertical remain. Here are five reasons it’s hard for all but the largest lead sellers to survive today:

Lead Quality: Simply selling leads is no longer the end game – the end game is selling “quality” leads, generally described as leads that convert into paying customers. I’ve noted this in the past, but lead gen is really a misnomer to describe this sort of transaction, it’s really just a revenue share. For lead sellers, this means that you have to work a lot harder to get paid, and you are constantly evaluated on your ability to consistently bring in quantity and quality.
Economies of Scale: Big lead sellers can negotiate better deals with partners and thus get their leads cheaper. They can also “blend” high quality and low quality leads more seamlessly, which enables them to buy and sell low quality leads that a small player could not.
Diminished Arbitrage Opportunities: Five years ago, you could buy “San Mateo bad credit refinance mortgage rates” on Google AdWords and potentially be the only bidder on this keyword. Today, a combination of AdWords changes that largely eliminate “long tail” keywords and much savvier competition makes it unlikely that you can buy a click for $.05 and make $50. Most online marketing arbitrage opportunities have gone by the wayside.
Buyer Knowledge: Most large lead buyers now have sophisticated in-house teams and technology to evaluate their lead sources. In some cases, lead buyers are acquiring their leads directly, through in-house marketing teams. The bottom line is this: five years ago, you could still “fool” some buyers with bad leads, today you can’t.
Regulation: Federal and state regulations have made it more expensive to operate a lead selling business. CAN-SPAM is the most widely stated example of regulation that has impacted lead sellers, but there’s also been increased attention by the FTC and proposed regulation in Europe that is taking its toll.

Taking all of these factors together, you need to have a pretty large operation to be a successful lead generator. From lead quality technology, business development teams, smart ad buyers, and talented lawyers, lead gen just isn’t the domain of ‘mom and pop’ shops out of a garage like it once was.