Finance Merchants - how are your conversions?

[Michael_Anthony]

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As many here will know, we sell finance leads in many sectors, and charge much higher prices than most network programs based on high conversions for our merchants. As quite often there are differing definitions of conversions, for the purposes of this discussion a conversion is when an online lead becomes a fully completed transaction.

However, much of this is assumption - although I know how our leads convert, I have no idea how these figures compare to industry averages. I'd be interested to hear how leads convert for other finance merchants and ideally at what CPA.

We come across many merchants buying very cheap leads that convert at around 1-2%, who tell us that our own leads are too expensive. However, the fact that these merchants are making 100 telephone calls to convert 1 or 2 leads means that their costs associated with each conversion are far higher than someone making 5 calls for one conversion. Typically these high volume, low CPA merchants are buying very small form data, such as name, address, phone number only; or they are buying leads that have already been rejected by a bank or broker.

So, our figures..

UK IVA - £100-£120 per lead - 23% conversion
UK Trust Deed - £50-£65 per lead - 21% conversion
Debt Management - £30-£35 per lead - 18% conversion
Secured Loan - £165 per lead - 14% conversion (Long, 92 field form)
Secured Loan - £110 per lead - 7% conversion (Short, 20 field form)
UK Commercial Mortgage - £75 per lead - 32% conversion
UK Remortgage - Bad Credit - £120-£140 per lead - 17% conversion
UK Remortgage - Good Credit- £20-£25 per lead - 12% conversion
UK Debt Consolidation Loan (Unsecured) - £7-£12 per lead - 8% conversion

Costs per lead are what the ultimate buying merchant pays, so if you are using a network or agency please allow for their margins when making your own calculations.

Please feel free to post anonymously rather than disclose something confidential.

We've also found that adjusting criteria such as minimum loan value/income etc can make a huge impact on conversions - our IVA lead conversions doubled just through the addition of a minimum household income criteria.

And of course the longer the form (the more fields collected) the better the conversions - this is for two reasons..

1) With more data, the merchant has a full application from which to work and therefore has to spend less call centre resource collecting missing info. Quite often the customer can be credit scored etc before they are contacted (having agreed to this process as part of the application terms and conditions)

2) A consumer sitting at their computer and filling out a 92 field form is much more committed than one simply providing their name, address and phone number.

Anyway, those are our experiences based on three years' working with UK Finance merchants. I'd be really interested to hear how others have fared by comparison and what has and hasn't worked for them.

[drivetowin]

Michael

Those figures are very interesting and certainly food for thought