Too many UK Secured Loan Leads - help!

[Michael_Anthony]

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Over the last few months my businesses' productivity of UK Secured Loan leads has grown to the point where we are generating more leads than our existing merchants can cope with. As of today, our potential productivity is around 12,000 leads per month, but we only have buyers for 8-9,000. As a result, we are restricting our affiliates to quotas and they are forced to take lower prices from less reliable buyers for their surpluses.

Our standard lead has around 80 fields and is a "ready to credit score" full application. Leads are generated from pure web search, no call centres, incentive sites or similar rubbish are permitted. Leads are fresh, unique, de-duplicated and convert at between 8-14% for our existing merchants, who include Loans.co.uk, Picture, and Freedom Finance.

Delivery can be by txt ar csv files attached to emails, with optionial PGP encryption, or by XML feed as desired.

Leads are sold on a pure CPA basis, we are not interested in "back end" arrangements where payment is only made on completion. A test sample of (minimum) 50 leads can be provided in order for prospective buyers to test quality.

We welcome enquiries from networks, media agencies and direct from merchants. If interested, please either pm me here or email me at michaelanthony@btconnect.com

[Michael_Anthony]

We now have a similar problem with adverse remortgage leads - not quite as much volume available as for Secured Loans, but still healthy and available to any reasonable bidder.

[Alex AJI]

Very keen to discuss this further, both for secured loan leads and adverse remortgage leads. We have a number of clients in both sector. Please mail me @ alex@ajinteractive.co.uk with more details on price etc.

Thanks

[simonb]

Leadbay currently accepts an unlimited volume of leads into its system.

We do not set caps on volume and accept all types of mortgage and loan leads including tennants and unsecured loans using one simple high converting form. If you want to send us leads then please feel free to sign up at www.leadbayaffiliate.co.uk.

Current adverse remortgage pricing is averaging at £180 per lead this month and the validation is over 85%.

[Michael_Anthony]

Simon, thanks for the offer but as you know we can't work with anyone that mentions the "v" word - validation.

The fact that you accept an unlimited amount of leads into your system is neither here not there if we don't know how many will be paid for, or at what rate.

[axod]

If the payout is average of £180, with validation at 85%, then surely that translates to an average price of £153..... or am I missing something?
Doesn't seem to me anything at all wrong with validation, as long as you factor it into the equation..... unless your leads are all crap and none will get validated of course

[simonb]

Michael,

By you own admission in this post further up you de duplicate leads and that is a form of validation in itself. If a Mr. MIckey Mouse applies for a secured loan then I would not expect a mechant to pay for that lead. So we both have validation policies except ours is a bit more stringent than yours but that is why we achieve excellent prices for affilaites and manage to sell over 1000 mortgage enquiries a day and over 400 loan enquiries a day.

Axod - I understand the logic and i guess it makes sense but i don't count Mickey Mouse as a lead and it wouldn't give an accurate reflection if I included these in average lead prices and as you mentioned different affilaties have different invalid rates.

I never used to mention invalid/valid rates until Michael started to try to score points over it. If you generate internet leads you will get a certain proportion that are invalid. As long as the invalid policy doesn't extend so that the mechants can just invalidate leads because they havn't done business then it works for all parties.

[axod]

Axod - I understand the logic and i guess it makes sense but i don't count Mickey Mouse as a lead and it wouldn't give an accurate reflection if I included these in average lead prices and as you mentioned different affilaties have different invalid rates.

Sure. I appreciate including both the average payout and the validation rate is more information for affiliates - it means we know how much we could get for the leads if they all validate, and what we are more likely to get if ours validate at the same % as others.
I was just pointing out that it's an odd decision by Michael to rule out a merchant just because they validate (Who doesn't!)... Concentrating on the actual ROI or effective price paid per lead after validation seems a smarter thing to do IMHO.

[marky]

If the payout is average of £180, with validation at 85%, then surely that translates to an average price of £153..... or am I missing something?
Doesn't seem to me anything at all wrong with validation, as long as you factor it into the equation..... unless your leads are all crap and none will get validated of course

Axod, I think Simon said average pricing, not payout of the leads, which is what the buyer of the lead pays. Leadbay work on a revenue share model so as an affiliate I think you receive something from 50 to 70% of the lead price, with leads over £100 starting at 65% up to 70% so you would receive (at an average of £180/lead) from £117 to £126 (no vat) per lead (that is validated !) Please someone correct me if I am wrong

Validation is a hotly debated topic from all camps & if the mods allow it, would be great to see a proper debate on the subject, a lot of people feel very strongly about it & maybe see all sides of the arguement..from underlying merchants, to Michael and Simons views as well ?

[lethal0r]

Current adverse remortgage pricing is averaging at £180 per lead this month and the validation is over 85%.

do you have validation figures for a full month?

[simonb]

do you have validation figures for a full month?

I do but the figures are very dependant on the affiliate methods for generating the enquiries and the marketing message on the page. If an affiliate puts on a page 'complete this for for a free online quote' then the consumer rightly thinks there is no need for them put in real details and will fill it out with mickey mouse details. If an affiliate puts ' Complete your details so we can get a qualified mortgage / loan adviser to contact you and search the whole of the market for the best deal for you' then consumers are a lot happier to complete real details and hence get a much higher validation rate.

For these reason we have some affiliates who have a 98% validation rate and others who have only a 75% validation rate. Since this issue came up several months ago one thing we have done is to amend our online realtime control panel to show the validation status of evey lead in Leadbay and if it has been invalidated why it has been invalidated Also leads are not finally accepted as being invalid until they have been verified as invalid by our helpdesk. A time consuming process but one which saves the affiliate (and us) a significant amount of revenue. If any affiliate feels a lead has been wrongly invalidated then ring us up and we will go through it.

It's all about hitting the right balance between providing good completion and validation rates for affiliates (and no lead volume limitations) and providing good quality leads that merchants are happy paying on a true payment per lead basis. That fact we generate and distribute the largest number of mortgage leads in the UK is testament to the fact that I feel we have that balance right at the moment. I'm always happy to talk to anyone who think we can improve through.

[ksanjitha]

Current adverse remortgage pricing is averaging at £180 per lead this month and the validation is over 85%.

This is all far from the truth( £180 is the cost at which lead may get sold after which leadbay eats 35% or over of that and then hands out the rest to the affiliate then on top they cancell the leads). I have tested it with a sample of sub-prime remo leads and I have just now looked at the stats which say 4 cancelled out of 10 which will make my "booty" £60+ per lead. Given that the forms are hosted by leadbay and the leads are realtime etc I see no reason for these many cancellations.
All in all leabay sucks big time. I spoke to a few others as well and their experience is not different.

Stay away!

[simonb]

ksanjitha,

Thank you for attempting to raise your issues with me directly rather than posting directly to the forum. Since we are here we may as well go into this one in a bit of detail.

Turns out you have submitted 10 adverse remortgages into Leadbay. You must have some excellent marketing methods as this was 10 out of 12 leads in total, the other 2 being remortgages. This is a remarkable mix of leads for internet generated enquiries however there may be good reason for it so I'll let that by.

The average price per lead for these adverse remortgages was infact £201.70 so actually £20 more than I quote as an average in my post. You are right we do take a percentage of the sale price however this varies dependant on volume and sale price and is up to 80%. We do not take a percentage from the purchaser so the price you see is a true price we receive.

It does seem that 4 of your leads have been submitted as invalid however we have not accepted them yet. Our process is that if a broker submits a lead as invalid then we have a team here at Leadbay that will check whether the lead meets our criteria for invalidation. We take up to 3 days to assess the lead. If we find that the lead was actually valid then the lead will show as valid again in you control panel. Bear in mind that if a lead is invalidated we receive no revenue either so we really do work hard on your behalf to ensure that as many leads as possible are valid. Part of the reason we can achieve such high prices is due to the fact we only allow leads into our system that meet our standard of quality and leads that are generated in a complaint manner.

The 4 leads submitted have all been submitted as 'Unable to contact' so they will be pretty easy to assess. Our help desk will call the numbers up to 9 times over the next 3 days. If the consumer is contacted then the lead is valid.

Hope you understand all this. I will follow up with another post when I have more information - alternatively you could just pick up the phone and talk to me anytime ...

[magenta]

wow, what a nice problem to have!!