Leadpile’s Blog

We are all used to typing in the URL of the domain that we want to go to, however there has been some recent changes to the “dot com” world. For many people writing an email in another language is common, but typing in a website name in another language was not anything that you could do. However, with the recent standard changes this could be a thing of the past. NPR reports that, “Over half of the 1.6 billion users of the Internet today are born in a language group that does not use Latin scripts.” By mid 2010, people will be able to have URLs in their native language, and not have to be in the standard Latin. This is exciting for many that are wanting to expand the URLs that are used, and create more opportunity for those that are not using the standard language in the URLs. We shall see how this change goes, considering the last change to domains was way back in 1996!

Seeking services (lead generation) online, communicating with others (social networking), and reading the top news stories, is now all being conducted through everything EXCEPT our nation’s newspapers. In recent years, many newspapers realized this need for immediate information, therefore created an online version of their newspaper. Unfortunately, this scrambling did not prevent the potential elimination of alot of the newspapers. It’s a sad day in the newspaper world when NPR reports the fact that our nation’s newspaper circulation has dropped 10%, just in the past 6 months. Newspaper’s loss of revenue is largely caused by a decline in advertising dollars.
What does this mean to all of us? In many ways, it takes away an old tradition that many of our parents and grandparents have experienced their whole lives. More importantly, it takes away a source for all of us looking for reading material, jobs, coupons, store ads, obituaries, local and national news. The question is, where on the internet can we go to now for this sort of resource? This is something very difficult for one “website” to be able to provide, so I am not sure how we are all going to potentially survive without the irreplaceable newspaper?

There seems to be some momentum brewing in the auto industry. We all saw some positive response to the Cash For Clunkers program, and it appears there might be some light at the end of the tunnel with the auto finance industry. Leadpile has written about the increase in bankruptcies and the housing market still struggling, however there seems to be some little signs that people might be starting to look again for cars. This could be great news for consumers, dealerships, and and the lead generation industry who has seen some stagnant volume of leads coming in.

Recent conversations that I have been having with affiliates, indicates that there might be that demand again for the auto finance leads. This is potentially exciting news for Leadpile because now we can reach out to our publishers to bring in this lead type. Leadpile publishers can drive traffic to our auto finance offers, place a Microclick form on their website(s), use banners or do a host and post.
Let’s all cross our fingers that this is the beginning of the end of our struggling auto finance industry. If it is any indication by all the Ford commercials that are playing on our televisions, this industry it coming back!

There are some great new changes that have been added to the Leadpile seller account interface.
LeadPile has not only changed the visual appearance of our seller interface, but we have also added several convenient new features:
*Earnings Trends – simple overview of your account statistics
*Top Performing Offers – current LeadPile offers that are in high demand
*Today’s Activity Summary – overview of what happened today
*Easy to Use Navigation Bar- organized tabs to navigate efficiently
With the new interface being more intuitive and better organized, we hope that you find the new layout and design more user friendly, more appealing to the eye, and best of all more functional!

The generation gap between the boomers and younger generations is becoming more apparent and widening the gap even more with the effects of the recession. Dropping home prices and stock values give employed people in their younger years an opportunity to invest and purchase in ways that would not have been possible to them without the drastic decline in value from the recession. On the opposite end of this scale, the aging generations such as the boomers are taking a large hit, watching their homes and 401(k) accounts drop by huge percentages in value.
First-time home buyers being offered $8,000 tax credits, and the stock market at all time lows adds extra benefits for generation X’ers looking to get a head start. People in their 20’s or 30’s have plenty of time to get in now and watch their investments grow, giving them a huge advantage to someone in their 50’s or 60’s looking to retire.
According to msnbc.com the Consumer Price Index has recorded a rare drop over the past 12 months, 1.5 percent. The decline for many goods and services has been much greater, allowing young people to put even more money into stocks and housing.
For those who are fortunate enough to have remained employed and have the opportunity to invest have a great advantage….For those who have been working all of their lives to retire and now are faced with hard decisions and losses, it feels as though they are being taken advantage of. It’s scary to think that even the best layed out plans could turn bad.
Recently there has been enormous amounts of discussion surrounding Payday loans, and the push by some to get rid of this option. With the economy in the state that it is, and people’s budgets and financial futures in question Payday loans are the stepping stone to help people get from point A to point B. They may not be the perfect solution to the problem, however at the time, they may be the only.

This week Google launched a test for the ‘Wave”, a new interface for communication that allows group discussions, email, instant messaging, picture and video editing and posting, blogging… there really is not much that this new communication tool does not do! A selected 100,000 people were invited by Google to use this new tool during it’s testing phase, and then to supply feedback and suggestions.
The Wave is set up in a real time format allowing conversations to transition from email to live conversation such as instant messaging. According to wave.google.com, the definition of a Wave is as follows:

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A Wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A Wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a Wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

If the Wave is able to combine all of the forms of conversation that are currently available, how will this change an industry such as Lead Generation? Will this replace the need for topic specific forums, and blogs? If a demand for lead types is posted, and instantly a supplier is able to respond and make a connection and discuss in an open format for others to see, it could be a huge thing for brand recognition! Being able to edit content and rewind to see where posts are coming from, could be an asset when the need for “damage control” arises.
I have signed up to be on the list of hopefuls in the next rounds of invitations sent out, I can’t wait to get on this wave!

We hear so much news about social networking sites and all the changes that are going on with them. However, I would have thought that reports would show internet users tend to use social networking sites more than content related sites. That does not seem to be the case. DMNews is reporting that users are actually spending almost twice as long on content websites versus the social networking sites. I found that very surprising. According to the reports, “Consumers spent an average of 6 hours, 58 minutes on content sites, while they spent about half of that time on community sites: 3 hours, 1 minute.
Consumers spent an average of 2 hours, 40 minutes a month on e-commerce sites; communications — e-mail and instant messaging — sites commanded 4 hours, 54 minutes; and search took up 57 minutes. Compared with 2008, time with content rose slightly, while communications, community and commerce slipped a small amount, and search jumped by a few minutes.
In terms of share of online time per category, people sent 42% of their time on content sites, down 2% compared with 2008. They spent 13% of their time on e-commerce sites, down 19% vs. 2008; and 13% of their time on community sites, up 63% compared with last year. Time spent on searches remained flat at 5%.””
So actually when looking at the numbers the community sites/social networking sites had increased which now really makes sense. In future years, this report I am guessing will continue to show a rise in the social networking sites year after year. I would also have guessed that e-commerce sites would have been higher because a lot of people purchase products online. Maybe because of the status of our nation’s economy has made an impact on the figures for that category? Either way, this is pretty interesting information for all of us that are looking to know where consumers are.

Two of the most popular search engines have both released a new and innovative way to look at your search results . Bing.com and Google.com just introduced “visual search”. Visual search is going to allow the users to select search images rather then typing in key words.
The visual search lets users sort through popular search categories by using pictures. Yet Google’s new Fast Flip will show thumbnails of pages when searching for news stories, instead of the short descriptions and headlines the company usually provides.
With this new and unique way of searching topics and articles it is sure to bring more web traffic to both of these sites. People are always looking to check out new ideas, and this is definitely a fun new way to utilize both Bing and Google!

Keeping up with the fast pace of the Internet advertising world is a challenge for anyone let alone a huge conglomerate such as Google. Google, which is constantly under a close eye by many in the online-marketplace for changing trends and new directions to follow is once again advancing in ways to attract consumers.
According to MediaPostNEWS Google has been advancing the advertising opportunities offered in many ways such as upgrades to its search engine, mobile, Adwords and AdSense platforms. Google has recently also re-vamped the placement of text ads making the over all look of the search page cleaner with less gaps improving the search experience.
Good news for Google investors is the hope that improvement in analytics and the Web site optimizer will prove to increase consumer spend by tracking traffic patterns and pin-pointing sites that attract high volumes of visitors. I mean really does this mean anything to the internet world, or is this something that they SHOULD be doing to stay in competition with the other search engines? Hopefully this sets the precedence that you have to continue to improve what you have and not take advantage of the fact that you are #1. Really Google could just sit in the first place of search engine use, and not look internally to improve, but instead they are being proactive to always look at ways to enhance what they have.

Almost anything or anyone you want to know more about can be found on the internet. However, when you go to a website is there something that stands out as something that makes you “trust” that website as a reputable source versus another website? There are in fact certain reasons consumers seem to trust one site over another. Nielson Global did a survey on consumers to see what makes them trust a particular website and it’s advertising versus another.

What this information really tells all of us in the lead generation industry is, that maybe we need to continue to focus on how we can really become a more trusted source by consumers. TV, newspaper and other sources came out ahead of methods such as banner ads, mobile and other online lead generation methods. The question then is how do we increase the trust level our consumers have for websites we are working with to generate leads? Brand recognition is pretty high on the list of trusted sources, however not everyone has a brand that is known, or the financial ability to generate that awareness.
Leadpile, and I am sure all other lead generation companies, are all looking at this sort of information as informative, but how can we take this information and apply it to what we do?

One of the newest forms of advertising is mobile adverting/SMS marketing. Being that this form of lead generation is completely different, there has to be alternative ways to measure success. After looking into this further, Gigaom.com pointed out some valid points on how mobile advertisers can effectively track stats.

Reach

Mobile enables a closed loop functionality like no other medium. Transactions are essentially a measure of the “true” ROA. We need to measure how a campaign impacts a company’s bottom line. If the campaign doesn’t move the needle over time, it didn’t really work, but we won’t know whether or not it has without measuring.

Leadpile has seen some successful publishers generating quality leads through mobile advertising, however after reviewing some of these point, maybe there are some enhancements Leadpile and other networks need to look at implementing. How big will mobile advertising get?

In a previous blog post, I discussed the FTC cracking down on those that were making “robocalls” to consumers. These were calls where a computerized message was placed to consumers about things such as car warranties. Well now it is official- The FTC (Fair Trade Commission) has enacted new rules forbidding the prerecorded commercial telemarketing calls to consumers without written permission from the consumer. These calls being eliminated has created a lot more buzz for internet generated leads, because now businesses need to get the most targeted people they can for their buck. A perfect example of this is the car warranty leads. The car warranty industry was very much involved in having these pre recorded calls placed to consumers to drum up business. Now that this is illegal, many advertisers are reaching out to companies like Leadpile for the targeted car warranty leads where the consumer physically opted in for information about a car warranty. Other verticals like debt and repairing your credit are services that were using robo type of calls and will be counting more on people like us to get these targeted consumers.
The ironic thing that just happened to me. I just received a robocall from a lender wanting to try and modify my home loan. Unfortunately, I tried to get a live person on the phone and was unsuccessful. I guess these new FTC rules didn’t scare everyone.