Archive for 2009

LeadQual’s shopping spree continues.  As a follow-up to our Secret Shopper study for education leads, we decided to shop the mortgage industry to determine how quickly lenders respond to their mortgage leads.

In our study, lead forms were completed and submitted for 136 lenders.  Incredibly, only 40% of our inquiries received a telephone response over a 24 hour period.  That’s right - 60% of our inquiries did not receive a response!  The average response time for leads that did receive a response was just under SEVEN hours!

To be sure, there are lenders responding to all their leads, and doing so quickly.  Our study concludes that the current state of lead response presents both a challenge and an opportunity for virtually every lender that generates or purchases Internet leads.

We will be presenting results of our study at the Mortgage Bankers Association 96th Annual Convetion and Expo in San Diego, booth #425.  Visit us at our booth, or call us to get your individual company results.   The study can be downloaded here:  http://www.leadqual.com/case-studies.html.

Jeff Miller

Here at LeadQual, we decided to do a bit of shopping. We bought 5 cell phones, and gave them all to Kima. Kima then completed 5 different web forms for 92 different schools. Kima then grew 3 more ears and hit submit! Actually, we’ve been doing this over the past few months, so she could effectively log in each lead and each response.

The results are startling. Only 63% of leads were responded to, and the average response time was over SEVEN hours.

Wow. Schools are spending so much money to generate the leads, but don’t have the systems in place to effectively manage them. Feel free to download the study here:

http://www.leadqual.com/case-studies.html

If you’d like to see if we secret shopped your school, please drop us a line, or come visit us at the CCA show in Orlando.

Regards,

Andrew Coleman

Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn’t list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like “Buy discount cola” and “Snacks on sale.” The ads wouldn’t be useful since you wouldn’t know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

That is why, in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience, we are adjusting our trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google’s policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard.

Google announced today that they are making updates to the their trademark policy. In the past advertisers were allowed to bid on trademark terms but were not allowed to use trademark terms in their Google Adwords adcopy. However Google has opened up their trademark policy for a few exceptions.
Read on to See Google Trademark Policy Exceptions

LeadQual has released a white paper showing how rapid response to internet leads increases conversion.  You can view the white paper here.

LeadQual’s lead response and live lead transfer service was created on this principle, and we proud to have the data to show how our customers benefit.

Key findings of white paper include:

• Prospective buyers fill out 3-5 lead forms
• The first to contact a lead increases conversion 238%
• More than 65% of all conversions occur on first call
• Calling a lead more than 5 minutes after a lead is submitted has a 46% lower qualification rate than calling in less than 5 minutes.
• Speed of response is the best predictor of a closed transaction
• Enormous opportunity exists for after-hour and weekend calling when most companies are not staffed for a rapid response

It is important to note how calling within 5 minutes after a lead is submitted dramatically increases conversion.  This is where a call center that specializes in lead response can drive success.

For more information on this study and our live lead transfer service, please contact us here.

MSN Conversion Inflated

Most marketers and agencies probably never noticed, but MSN’s tracking has always been unreliable. Here at LeadQual, we knew about this problem because we do what we can to trace every click down to the conversion or sale. We try to de-dup our tracking efforts and match the numbers just to be sure what we report is accurate.

Microsoft’s adCenter conversion has always been inflated, the script often firing multiple times each time a person would refresh the page, reopen the conversion page (bookmarking the receipt page) or back into the page. This causes major pains when trying to analyze the performance.

LeadQual Implements MSN Conversion Hack

Here at LeadQual we spent time and resources to implement a code hack into our conversion codes in order to more accurately record conversion data. It de-duped the data for such refreshes or accidental reopening of the page. It made us proud to know that we had a solution for this tracking issue that most people were not even aware of.

The New Conversion Tracking Options

Well that felt good while it lasted. Good news for everyone, MSN has finally caught up. They announced new tracking options that would allow the user to track utilizing different methods.
Read More about MSN adCenter’s New Conversion Tracking Options