Scroll down for a discussion on Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1 within the Insurance Leads.
I've seen many posts from people asking the following type questions regarding lead companies: "Has anybody heard of ____? Are their leads any good? Can ...
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I've seen many posts from people asking the following type questions regarding lead companies: "Has anybody heard of ____? Are their leads any good? Can I trust them? etc. etc." Those are good questions to ask in this forum. However, there are also simple tools you can use online, for free, that will also help you investigate a lead company. Here are a few examples:
Most questions boil down to lead quality. One of the best indicators of lead quality is the source of the lead and the type of audience that makes up the traffic. This can be determined by the other interests of that traffic. Quantcast.com tracks visitor interests by tracking what a website's "Audience Also Likes" and "Audience Also Visits." What I feel is important is that you see other websites listed that bear some relationship to the type of insurance you sell. Keep in mind, it is not uncommon to see other lead company websites in these categories. People who are interested in insurance will visit multiple lead generation websites while shopping and lead generation websites push traffic to each other. Even small amounts of traffic pushed between websites can result in a high affinity score between the two.
What I feel should raise an eyebrow is when a website that you don't typically think of being related to insurance occupies a category and has a high affinity score. I personally don't believe there is a natural strong relationship between, for example, a lottery or prize website (incentive) and a natural interest in insurance. After all, insurance has nothing to do with prizes. Therefore, if you see websites like mypoints.com, bigwin.com, luckysurf.com, iwon.com, publishersclearinghouse.com, and/or rewardport.com you may want to ask that lead company what percentage of the leads they are selling come from that traffic. You also might want to ask if they give a discount on leads coming from that traffic (I don't know if they will give a discount but it is my personal opinion that it is not worth as much as other leads.)
Take a look at what two of those same three company's visitors also like and visit (MostChoice doesn't use any incentive websites and I am running out of space for this post, 10000 character max.)
Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
Originally Posted by YouGotMyMoney
Yes thank you very much.
Your very welcome. BTW, now that I have enough space and for purposes of full disclosure, this is the same report for MostChoice.com. I believe you will notice a big difference in websites and affinity scores.
Audience Also Likes
The people who visit mostchoice.com are also likely to visit these categories and sites:
Affinity
Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
Mike is there a website that will tell you which keyword searches . a vendor uses to get traffic?
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Also Mike, on Quantcast are those Unique Visitors or just hits?
------------------------------------
Mark
"Corner Bar"---Independent Agent Anthem
My credit score's fallen like the New York Mets
There ain't a debt collector that ain't called yet
They say, "Money don't talk, it only swears"
And got me cussing in my underwear
Last edited by YouGotMyMoney : 02-22-2009 at 12:59 AM.
Reason: Posts merged
Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
Originally Posted by YouGotMyMoney
Mike is there a website that will tell you which keyword searches . a vendor uses to get traffic?
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Also Mike, on Quantcast are those Unique Visitors or just hits?
Compete.com measures unique visitors. Quantcast does statistical tracking. They don't give a unique visitor number or hit number. They just calculate which websites are statistically significantly related by audience.
Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
Originally Posted by CHUMPS FROM OXFORD
Keyword searches would be nice to know. I know Netquote uses "Dental" in some of their searches and it drives me up a wall.
I'll look and see if I can find a good free one that would be of value. The problem with keywords is that with tail term advertising you can drive a lot of traffic to your website with a keyword but that says nothing about conversion. In other words, lets say you can buy all the traffic you want with the term "dental" at a penny a click. However, only one visitor in a thousand fills out a form. It will look like that is a significant source of traffic but in reality it is a small source of leads. Thats the difference between search traffic and incentive traffic. The whole process is different because there is no other incentive to fill out the form other than what they really want.
What makes you think the problem is with a keyword and not a dental website affiliate? I'm sure we have some tail term advertising on some form of "dental" term yet we rarely get a lead from it. If someone is looking for dental insurance only and they land on a health form they will just hit there back button if they aren't interested in health insurance. Only a small percentage of people looking for dental are also looking for health. I would imagine they would do the same with any lead companies form, unless it had "Dental Insurance" only on it without a description that the form was for health insurance. To be fair, I have never seen a Netquote Dental form.
Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
Originally Posted by CHUMPS FROM OXFORD
Keyword searches would be nice to know. I know Netquote uses "Dental" in some of their searches and it drives me up a wall.
Not to mention the fact they sell these Dental only, and Dental & Vision only leads as Preferred Health Leads.
While I'm on the subject, I might as well add that they do the same thing with International Travel Leads, these are also sold as Preferred Health Leads.
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Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
Originally Posted by YouGotMyMoney
Mike is there a website that will tell you which keyword searches . a vendor uses to get traffic?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Also Mike, on Quantcast are those Unique Visitors or just hits?
Well, for starters, you can 'right-click' on a web page and select 'view source.' You will see the HTML coding for the page. At the top, you will see a <header> tag. Look in the meta description and you will see the key words a site is using for the search engines to pick them up. These words are in the <meta> area. Example from netqote attached...
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="Description" content="Compare insurance quotes for auto, home, health, life, and business insurance. Get multiple online insurance quotes at NetQuote and save on your insurance." />
<meta name="Keywords" content="[COLOR="Red"]insurance, insurance quote, auto insurance, home insurance, health insurance, term life, universal variable, agents, agent, quotes, quote, life, whole, universal, variable, business, netquote, policies, coverage, liability, car[/COLOR]" />
A web page will also be picked up by search engines based on the number of times some of these and other search words are utilized in the page. There is some threshold where if you just try to utilize your words too many times, the search engines may just classify it as spam and ignore the page all together. For example, you may see some non-professional pages have a keyword repeated 30 times at the bottom of a page, listed and out of context. Another thing people may try is to write their search words into the page and make the font color match the background color so the search engines see the word but people don't unless they highlight the area.
There's tons more to this. I'm not an expert. That's almost the full extent of my understanding.
Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
Quantcast does statistical tracking. They don't give a unique visitor number or hit number. They just calculate which websites are statistically significantly related by audience.
This is not true, they do give visitor and unique numbers, along with pageviews.
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Originally Posted by YouGotMyMoney
Thanks I didn't even realize you could do that. So when you view the source page, those are the keywords they are bidding on the get traffic?
These words are embedded in the html coding and search engine 's web crawlers find these words. That's one way your page comes up in search results as relevant to your search request.
That is just the beginning. Then, there is search engine OPTIMIZATION, SEO which is complex. When you talk about bidding on search words, I'm not sure what you are talking about unless you are going to use GOOGLE adwords. Then you can list all kinds of search terms.
I'm no pro so here's a link to a nice looking article.
I believe some companies have people who work full time in optimizing your website. In my opinion though, if you have no specific call to action or reason for people to give you their contact information, you are just wasting your time. Who cares if 50k people visit your site if you didn't capture any contact information or close any business?
Re: Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1Go to Top
One of the key components to SEO is getting other sites to point to you. The higher the quality and relevance, the better. You can do this yourself through web directories, social media, and blogs, not to mention article marketing.
If you want some hints on which sites would be good to point to yours, check out Alexa.com to see which sites link to your competitors.
Oh, and don't forget to install a free analytics plugin like from Google to make sure you can measure real progress and identify areas that need fine tuning.
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Originally Posted by Melmunch3
This is not true, they do give visitor and unique numbers, along with pageviews.
Where? Is it part of the paid service or are you just referring to the graph of the overall number and the total? Overall traffic doesn't relate to any one particular website or visitor type. Affinity scores are statistical. Everything else I see is a percentage of a total but is marked as a "rough estimate" only which again is based on statistics. I could be wrong, but I'm not seeing any quantified traffic data that relates to specific website sources for a given website.
In other words, I don't see that level of detail reported for unique visitors. I see affinity scores at that detail level.
Free Online Tools To Help Evaluate Lead Companies, Part 1
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