I have worked with different publishers, agencies, affiliates, ad-networks during the last 10 years for my education clients in the online MBA industry. With few of them I had tied up on Cost per Lead Model, and with some others I had worked on Cost per Admission (CPA),Cost per Click (CPC), Cost per Impression (CPM).
Initially I thought that I need to pay for all the incoming leads assuming that the quality of leads was good and they would get converted. But this was a wrong notion. Actually, most of them were bad as the agencies themselves punched data to provide leads to us. There were many other fraud activities on the agency side which I understood later on.
At the end of the month,the ROI did not match due to bad quality leads and this left me disappointed. From my experience, we need not search for an agency which provides leads at low cost but instead need to find out the agency which brings in high quality leads.
Cost Vs Quality
From my experience I derived many high-quality leads. The cost of leads derived from the below activities was high but the ROI was really good and above average. I learnt the strategy to improve conversion rate for my clients. The ROI of the leads obtained at very low cost was very low compared to leads of high cost. My activities are listed below in detail.
- From my past experience, the most high-quality leads were collected from mobile apps. But this applies to leads generated from organically downloaded apps. For this the basic necessity for a client is that they should possess Android/iPhone apps. For these kinds of leads the conversion rate would be even more than 10%. The other sources would result in less than 5%.
- Yahoo Search: The other high-quality leads were generated from Yahoo Search. I have witnessed 5% conversion rate for this. The no of leads would be less but the ROI would be very high. Also, if the search was made from a desktop device, the chance of conversion is even higher. The trend I have analysed is that if a person is making a Yahoo Search, he had initially made a Google Search prior to that for which he did not get a satisfactory result which intern prompted him to make a Yahoo Search.
- Google Search: High quality leads are generated from Google Search but this is also costly. However, the ROI is very high.
There are also many other agencies and other sources from which leads can be generated. But I do not rank them based on the cost but on the basis of quality of leads generated. My intention is that the ROI should be good at the end of the month.
