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/whitepapersindex.html.

Jeff Miller

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/whitepapersindex.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.

• Resale of the trademarked goods or services: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the goods or services corresponding to a trademark term. The landing page of the ad must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the goods or services corresponding to a trademark from the advertiser.
• Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to a trademark: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the components, replacement parts or compatible products relating to the goods or services of the trademark. The advertiser’s landing page must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the components, parts or compatible products corresponding to the trademark term from the advertiser.
• Informational sites: The primary purpose of the advertiser’s site must be to provide non-competitive and informative details about the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term. Additionally, the advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale of the goods or services of a competitor of the trademark owner.

This actually brings up a whole bunch of questions. Does the site have to be an official reseller? What if a site who wants to buy the term apple ipod decides to add one apple ipod component into it’s product list and then sends users to a list of products (With the ipod component highlighted of course)?  Is that ok? Can the informational site be run by a competitor as long as it doesn’t sell or facilitate the sale of their own goods? What if it equally links to all competitors? What if its a “A” vs “B” comparison site and “A” clearly has the better features? Can the company still buy “B” as a trademark term since its a fair informational site?

Lots of Questions. But Google is smart so let’s see how they position themselves for each of these type of scenarios.

Google: Don’t Blame Me, It’s the Advertiser

Google makes it explicit clear that Google is not in the position to arbitrate trademark disputes between advertisers and trademark owners. The advertisers themselves are responsible for their own adcopies and keywords and should be dealt with directly. However they are willing to perform limited investigations into complaints.

How do I Register my Trademark with Google?

Google actually does not register trademarks. You’ll have to register at the national office in which the trademark applies. You can ask Google to do a limited investigation into a trademark issue here.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
SEM - LeadQual

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.

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.

Option 1: Count one conversion per click

Option 2: Count one conversion per unique URL

Option 3: Count All (this was what it was by default before)

Woes of Microsoft

Of course it wouldn’t be Microsoft, if they didn’t make this difficult for you to implement. There is no check box you check off. Rather you have to insert couple lines of code into your conversion tracking code. Not difficult, but why not just have a check box? Baffling.

Also it is peculiar that this news wasn’t widely announced or broadcasted. I happen to find a blog post during my daily SEM readings that linked to the adCenter info page. Couldn’t Microsoft put up a notice on their sign in page announcing these new options? We think it’s a pretty big deal. Again Baffling. But not THAT Baffling. I had to go through about 30 screens to install Microsoft adCenter Desktop as opposed to clicking one file for Google. And MSN adCenters UI? Don’t get me started.

[Did I mention LeadQual is well known by the search engines for their great constructive feedback for all things SEM? Beta Tests, UI you name it, we've listed many areas of improvement. It's a love-hate relationship.]

Link to MSN adCenter - New Conversion Tracking Options

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

I thought it would be good to sit back and take inventory of these tools, and how we can use them.

First of all, here are some of the issues we’re trying to solve:

1. Keeping search engines from indexing pages we don’t want them to index.
2. Keeping search engines from crawling pages we don’t want them to crawl.
3. Keeping search engines from giving page rank to certain pages (whether on our site or on another site).
4. For pages that have variations in the URL due to parameters, capitalization issues, different pathways, etc, getting search engines to index just one version of that URL, and focus all page rank other URL formats get onto that one URL.
5. Removing pages from the index we’d like to get out.

To manage these issues, we now have some good tools:

1. Robots.txt:  This is the granddaddy of the tools, where you can tell some or all web crawlers to not crawl specific pages or sections of your site.  However, robots.txt does not keep search engines from indexing a page or passing page rank to that page, nor does it cause anything to be removed from the index.  It just stops the crawler.
2. Robots meta tag:  This is a useful tool for managing indexing and following of all links for a given web page.  You can specify “NOFOLLOW” to stop links on the page from being crawled or passing page rank to other pages, and/or you can specify “NOINDEX” to cause that page to not be indexed.  NOINDEX is especially useful for keeping a page out of the index (and might help it get removed, but that is not 100%).
3. rel=NOFOLLOW tag:  This is a tag you can put on an individual link to tell search engines to not follow a link, and to not pass page rank to that target page.  It is very useful for “sculpting” pagerank flow within your site, or to external sites, and it is a much more targeted that using robots meta NOFOLLOW (which impacts all links on a page).  It does not prevent crawling of a page through other pathways, and does not keep the target page out of the index.
4. Canonical link tag:  This new tag lets you specify the canonical link for a given page.  This is very useful for telling search engines to ignore other forms of a link to the same page, to not index those other forms of the URL, and to focus all page rank on one version of the page.  It won’t prevent those other forms of the URL from being crawled, and won’t remove them if they are already indexed, but it will tend to keep those other URLs out of the index.
5. Search engine URL removal tools:  Each search engine lets you request that certain URLs be removed from the index.  These are useful as a last resort for getting pages removed from the index, and generally work (though they are a pain to use).  It will not prevent a page from being crawled again and added back, but assuming you have done other things to prevent indexing, it shouldn’t come back.

As can be noted, each of these tools does different but overlapping functions.  It can be a bit confusing!  Used together, however, you can do some very powerful things with these to index just the pages you want indexed, control crawling on your website, and focus pagerank to the right pages.

To help conceptualize, here is a chart showing what does what:

In the above chart, a check mark indicates that tool has full control, while a * indicates partial control where the tool is helpful but cannot totally manage that issue.

By carefully using these tools, you can do a lot to focus search engines on the right pages, and help them rank higher.

The main tool I’d like in the future is a better way to get pages removed from the index.

John Erickson
www.leadqual.com