Breaking the Lead Gen Barrier: 3rd in a 4 part series
To start, I must issue the following notice: Because I co-founded the LinkTrust tracking platform, I'm both very excited to cover the topic of technology and aware that I must speak objectively about platform technology in general.
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Breaking the Lead Gen Barrier: 2nd in a 4 part series
I probably peaked your interest with part 1 when I shared with you the main benefits of getting into the lead generation business.
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Breaking the Lead Gen Barrier: Part 1 in a 4 Part Series
As the cofounder of Burstabit Media and the LinkTrust tracking and lead management platform, I come across companies all the time who are eager to start brokering leads and co-registration data rather than just sending traffic from their affiliates to their merchant's websites.
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Risky Business
Earlier this week, prior to ad:tech, we had the chance to join another gathering of those in the industry. We traveled to San Diego to participate in Experian Americas Sales Summit, joining a panel of those much...
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White paper: Maximizing the ROI of online lead generation campaigns
Imagine a car burning up the autobahn leaving even the best European designs in the dust. The only catch being that the fuel needed to power this vehicle was far from perfect.
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No School For You
Last month when we attended the Inman Real Estate Connect Show, a show packed with hundreds of real estate agents listening to leaders in the field and economists delivering the unfortunate truth that yes the housing...
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FTC and The Real future of Lead Gen
While the student loan industry has seen better times (see our coverage here), not all news from around the lead generation landscape carries such gloom, certainly not in the eyes of ValueClick, who yesterday...
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4 Ways to make Lead Generation Marketing Simple and Effective Now
Online lead generation is the fastest growing segment in online advertising. Lead generation is growing more than twice as fast as the online advertising market and, at last count, was valued in excess of $1.3 billion per year.
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A Lead Dilemma
During his presentation at TARGUSinfo's most recent online lead quality summit, Terrence Thomas, CMO of eLearners, made a comment that sounded like any other, but some comments end up sticking with you...
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Push vs. Pull in Lead Generation
If you follow the public companies within the Internet advertising space, you should have some familiarity with the rise and fall of Valueclick. The stock went from around $13 in the middle of 2006, doubled within five...
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iLegal - The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) - A Brief Introduction
I’ve had many people tell me that COPPA doesn’t apply to their data collection, and they do so with some confidence. Yet often when I ask them to what or whom does COPPA apply, they are unable to provide a simple summary.
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A Different Type of Subprime Fallout - Part 2
The marketing of subprime credit cards has gone on in scale, albeit rather quietly for years. My first recollection of these cards comes in 2002 not long after the collapse of Providian and their NextCard division which made, and...
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A Different Type of Subprime Fallout - Part 1
The past three weeks have had more than just the financial markets on edge. They have caused the whole world to take notice. Included in that group are those in the mortgage lead generation market. After years of prosperity, that...
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Making Sense of the Mortgage Market Mess, Week Two - Part 2
Over the course of several years, we've talked many times about the mortgage lead generation market. As the fuel for much of that growth, the subprime lending market, which collapses at unprecedented speeds, the mortgage lead...
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Making Sense of the Mortgage Market Mess, Week Two - Part 1
Almost four weeks ago today, on July 19, 2007, the Dow Jones closed at an all time high or 14,000. In the four weeks since, the Dow has managed to give now more than 1000 points, closing below 13,000 for the first time...
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University of Phoenix Does It Again
In February of 2006, University of Phoenix shook up the lead generation space by forming an exclusive partnership with Advertising.com. This meant that any company that produced leads or wanted to produce leads...
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Making Sense of the Mortgage Market Mess
For the past four, perhaps five years, the mortgage vertical has generated more leads and ultimately more revenue than any other. That could change this year as the mortgage market undergoes its biggest correction...
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Lead Management
Not too long ago we wrote about one of my personal favorites, web based instant messaging company Meebo. I have used the product since I first read a story of how it caught on in an unlikely place, with our troops...
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Quiz Show
If you use Gmail, you probably have noticed an ad showing up more than you might expect. Given its prominence and the seeming lack of relevance to your conversations, you might have wondered whether Coffeefool.com was more...
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True That
Imagine yourself three years ago looking for a market to explore. Yes, 2004, in a world before MySpace and Facebook, a time when New Century still bought leads. You had money, a solid leadership team, and a desire to enter into the...
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Lessons from one of the most competitive markets on the Internet
One of the most competitive markets on the Internet for a low cost, general interest product is the government grants information market. It’s filled with people looking for free money from the government, and the level of marketing...
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A Sub-prime Primer - Part 2
Mortgage banking as a whole has played a significant role in the Internet advertising landscape. It provided the catalyst and platform for LowerMyBills' $380 million purchase and NexTag's estimated $90 million...
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A Sub-Prime Primer - Part 1
In less than two weeks, from February 21, 2007 through March 5, 2007, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 700 points, or almost six percent of its value. In the week and a half since, the Dow has gained less...
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Lead Quality: Are you throwing away good leads?
You are probably dismissing good leads in ways you never thought possible. The purpose of this two part article (part two coming next week) is to turn the spotlight on some of the most common problem areas for you to inspect and provide a solution to improve your lead quality.
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Fair Weathered Pixel Practices
If it didn’t make me sound both old and/or worse behind the times, I would have begun this piece with “Back in my day.” But, really, back when my job involved, for lack of a better word, squeezing out the highest value per user...
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TheLoanPage.com 1997 - 2007
When we cover the lead generation space, we most often focus on new companies, acquisitions, interesting technologies, and/or strategies used in the space. In today’s hot bed of lead generation growth, we don’t often cover or...
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Birth of a Marketplace
To balance out this week’s Digital Thoughts, where we look at the incredibly non-direct marketing world of MySpace and YouTube, in this week’s Trends Report, we focus closer to our roots by looking at a company that has come a...
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Year of New Lead Generation Verticals
When those of us in the online advertising world think of lead generation, we often think of the volume leaders - mortgage and education. It's hard not to, as they, for the most part, dominate our advertising consciousness, especially...
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Captured: Experian Interactive Media Test
A little more than 18 months has passed since Experian Interactive acquired LowerMyBills, the top online mortgage banking lead generation firm, for $380 million in May 2005. And, almost a year and a half has passed since Experian...
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Lead Gen - Google takes a Baby Step
ClickZ ran an article that didn’t seem to draw much attention from other purveyors of Internet marketing news, the title of which tells, “AdWords to Host Small Business Landing Pages.” It might seem insignificant, but reading this...
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Buyerzone - Doing Lead Gen Right
As much as I’d like to think I know about lead generation and lead generation companies, each day it seems I learn of a lead generation company and/or vertical that I didn’t know before. Reading alarm:clock a few days ago, I had the...
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Lead Quality: Finding the right mix between quality and volume
“How do other lead generation companies pro-actively improve their lead quality while still delivering on the growing volume demands of their clients?”
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Lead Quality: “A Two Way Street”
A few months ago, I was talking about the state of online lead quality with the head of performance marketing for one of the top interactive agencies. I asked him to sum up his view on the type of relationship that lead sellers and buyers...
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Lead Quality: Click Fraud vs. CPA Fraud
I picked up the recent copy of Business Week that had a cover story on click fraud and quickly scanned it last week. Now is it just me or can none of the major business magazines in this country resist doing a story on this topic without including the...
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Hot Transfer - Pay per Call and Lead Generation
Pay per call reminds me in many ways of online video. It’s an area that shows tremendous growth and promise, but at the same time is so broad and has so many applications that wrapping one’s mind around it is difficult. There isn’t...
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Have We Met?
Lead generation companies represent some of the most prolific advertisers on both search and display. Despite their seemingly run of network approach and often incomprehensible reach, those at the top actually employ...
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Almost Live from TARGUSinfo Lead Quality Summit
Many companies have client conferences. Technology companies have long been known for theirs, and with respect to Internet companies, eBay can throw an event with the best of them. When it comes to Internet companies, not many...
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Quiet Period
In “Quality over Quantity” we focus on the general trend in lead generation of both the buyers of leads and the suppliers of leads focusing on producing higher quality, more efficient leads as opposed to trying to simply maximize the...
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Lead Generation: Quality over Quantity
There was a time in lead generation when all that mattered was the number of leads someone could produce. The price paid per lead was almost exclusively based on the numbers generated, not necessarily how those leads performed...
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SPOTLIGHT ON... Patrick McKenna from DMi Partners
- Learn about an agency managing an ad campaign at $100/click
- Learn about DMi Partners and the services they provide
- See how Patrick envisions his company in the future
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SPOTLIGHT ON... Larry Organ from ConsumerBase
- Find out how a data marketing company operates online
- Discover Larry Organ’s response to his controversial interview in Forbes Magazine
- Find out how you can make more money with your data
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SPOTLIGHT ON… Brady Whittingham from iLeadMedia
Meet Brady Whittingham and learn about his start in the industry. Find out about iLeadMedia’s acquisition by Think Partnership. Find out the steps Brady took to ensure the acquisition by Think Partnership was successful
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Mortgage Lead Gen’s “Strive for 5”
At the dealer where I take my car to be serviced, plain paper printouts adorn the walls reading, “We Strive for Five.” After asking, I learned that the service writers, that is, the one who handles your visit, receives more money if you give...
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Lead Generation: Pay-Per-Action
The June 20th cocktail party for Exchange Place could have doubled as a movie set. I was an invited guest representing ICMediaDirect.com and among some advertising professionals thoroughly enjoying views of the Manhattan...
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SPOTLIGHT ON: Lindsay Mure from Primary Ads and Ad Femme
- Find out how Lindsay got her start in the industry
- Find out how Ad Femme started
- Learn about women in advertising
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SPOTLIGHT ON.. Michael Krongel from Intermark Media
* interview with one of the originators of the lead generation model on the internet
* find out how online lead generation has changed since it started
* learn what new models are coming into lead generation
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Edu-adventures: Education Lead Generation Landscape
Part One of this piece on the recent Eduventures conference in Boston sets the framework for the information below. It tells of the unique nature of the conference as it brings together, not necessarily by choice, two very different...
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Edu-adventures: Connecting Two Worlds
This week marks the third year that Eduventures, a market research and consulting firm for education institutions, has put on their Competing in Higher Education tradeshow. With only a handful of lead generation firms at the show...
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SPOTLIGHT ON... Eyal Vadai From ECN Research
Find out why ECN Research offers are good for your traffic and protect your brand
- Learn the difference between the various types of market research offers
- Find out how ECN research gets their traffic
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Checking In With Online Education
The last piece I wrote about online lead generation covered the basics of lead generation and arose out of an agency/broker’s desire to get a CPA price quote for an unnamed school. Instead of...
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Information Asymmetry
Found on eBay - Turn-Key Mortgage Lead Gen Business Opportunity. Unfortunately, the listing no longer exists on eBay but it touches upon one of the more fascinating trends going on in the lead generation space - owning traffic.
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Lead Generation 1.0
In today’s Digital Thoughts we expose how a site like eBay can remove information asymmetry and shed light on an area that typically remains hidden.
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Sites Selling Phone Data Under Scrutiny
The Energy and Commerce Committee is issuing subpoenas to a dozen companies that sell confidential consumer phone data online after they refused to comply with the U.S. House of Representatives’ request for...
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The Shakeup
Two weeks ago, I began “A Rebuttal in Favor of Ad Networks” with the following, “There is a shakeup coming in the education lead generation landscape, and it’s being led by one of the largest buyers of leads and one of...
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The Price Fallacy - Economics of Lead Generation
Each day, people like myself receive countless requests to promote a particular cost per acquisition offer. Those pitching the offers all too often give in to the temptation to point out how the offer has an unlimited budget. That is...
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The Price Fallacy
Wal-Mart sold more than three-hundred billion dollars worth of goods last year, in other words, almost one-billion dollars per day in revenue. On any day, the company will earn more than the yearly revenue of Advertising.com, ValueClick...
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Lead Markets
The “interpreter of supply and demand,” that was a definition I came across when trying to figure out how to describe markets and marketplaces. When I hear the word, I think of the stock market, of people buying and selling in...
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Effectiveness in Lead Generation
As initially covered in Anatomy of a Lead Gen Industry, the business of lead generation can be broken down into three main components:
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