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Quality and Ethics Question (4)

10-27-2014 05:31 PM #1 laurenkeely (Member)
Quality and Ethics Question

So I see a lot of people mention quality in reference to leads. They say that they get kicked off of offers by the advertiser for bringing in low quality leads. What does a quality lead and a low quality lead look like? How can you prevent getting low quality leads?

My second question has to do with ethics. I'm curious as to what many of you thought when you first started out. There are lies, everywhere, in AM. The offer isn't really going to expire in 5 minutes. That picture probably isn't of a real member on a dating site. The guarantees made on landing pages aren't actually guaranteed. So, for those that entered this game with a pure and honest heart, how do you become okay with essentially lying to customers? I know its part of the game, so how do I change my mindset? Also, could a customer actually get an AM in trouble by calling them out on it?

10-27-2014 07:50 PM #2 scitox ()

Quote Originally Posted by laurenkeely View Post
So I see a lot of people mention quality in reference to leads. They say that they get kicked off of offers by the advertiser for bringing in low quality leads. What does a quality lead and a low quality lead look like? How can you prevent getting low quality leads?

My second question has to do with ethics. I'm curious as to what many of you thought when you first started out. There are lies, everywhere, in AM. The offer isn't really going to expire in 5 minutes. That picture probably isn't of a real member on a dating site. The guarantees made on landing pages aren't actually guaranteed. So, for those that entered this game with a pure and honest heart, how do you become okay with essentially lying to customers? I know its part of the game, so how do I change my mindset? Also, could a customer actually get an AM in trouble by calling them out on it?
Hola!

Regarding your first question for low quality leads: it depends on a lot of factors what the quality of your lead is and it also depends per vertical. I can give you 2 examples of verticals I have experience with what causes low quality leads.

Dating

In general dating companies make money if the user buys a premium subscription in the backend of the dating website. There are other monetization methods like webcams as well, but normally the biggest part is the subscription. I have experienced it's very important to go through the entire conversion flow yourself if you promote a dating site. This way you know exactly what to tell or not to tell the user on your landing page.

What causes low quality leads?
- "Selling" the user with the word "free" (Solution: don't mention things like "Free registration" or "No CC required". You can hint on your LP that premium membership gives the user more benefits, but you need to split test this per offer)
- Sending lower aged leads (Solution: the rule of thumb is that the older the lead, the higher the quality of the lead is. This is why your see on most LP's the question "Are you 25 or older?". If the answer is "no", don't let the user proceed to the offer. Also use images of older women in your ads to get older men.)
- Bad traffic source (Solution: if your traffic source/website where you buy yours ads is focussing on young ages or prominently advertises themselves with their "FREE CONTENT", you can be assured your leads will suck. Good traffic sources with HQ traffic for casual dating: TrafficJunky (= Pornhub / Youporn) & TrafficFactory (= xvideos / xnxx.com). For mainstream dating Facebook remains the highest quality traffic source at the moment.)

Gaming

Zeno might chip in here as well, since he's the "gaming God" of STM. Gaming companies make money by in-game purchases (either by real money or incentivez offers) or premium accounts.

What causes low quality leads?
- "Selling" the user with the word "free" (Solution: don't mention things like "Free registration" or "No CC required". You can hint on your LP that premium membership gives the user more benefits, but you need to split test this per offer)
- Sending lower aged leads (Solution: the rule of thumb is that the older the lead, the higher the quality of the lead is.)
- Lying what kind of game it is. If the game is a MMO, don't use a shooter image as your ad. The person thinks he'll get to aim with a gun, while in reality they're just clicking buttons. (Solution: use REAL screenshots of the game. Install/register yourself, play it for a little and make screenshots of what looks good. Hint: "Character creation" screenshots work wonderfully)


Regarding your second question about ethics... It differs from person to person, I've always chosen the wordings carefully and not straight up lie. Instead of saying "You WILL see photos of your co-worker blablabla" I say "You MIGHT see photos of your co-worker blablabla" for example. Regarding the expiring part, this is just marketing in my opinion and if you chose your wording wise, why not?

Hope it helps.

10-28-2014 07:22 AM #3 zeno (Administrator)

For gaming I think the quality depends on a few things - assuming the app/game itself is actually decent at monetising their users (some just seriously aren't):

1. Traffic source. Different traffic sources just bring different quality users. Leads from Facebook are almost always going to be better than leads from PPV - one is voluntary ad clicking and the other is interruption marketing. User intent goes a long way.

2. Gender and age. Some games do better with under 18s but usually older users are higher quality. If the game uses Freemium then users need to add a payment source and how comfortable they are with this depends on income amongst other things, and usually a 26 yr old is more financially sound than a 19 yr old. On the other hand if it's a monthly sub MMO it might do better with younger guys in the 18-25 range who don't have kids, more spare time, etc.

OK so I admit, it really just needs testing haha, different games, different results.

3. Angle and imagery. Gamers are visual creatures. Lots of people run campaigns and rip off other games images because it's the only way they know how to get decent CTRs. Well, sucks for them because you can almost guarantee that those misleading ads give some of the poorest quality leads in the industry. If someone sees a banner with the latest CoD images in it, join and find it is a third-rate shooter with terrible graphics... well, they are going to leave in droves.

As for ethics... this industry is what you make it.

A lot of people use deceptive tactics, I'm not a fan of it. However, things like countdowns and offer expiration are simple marketing tactics, scarcity elements and so on. Social proof, testimonials, price stacking, etc.

It's similar to retail stores that have a "up to 30% off" sale for this weekend only, but then they do the same thing throughout the next week but use different coloured signs just to fool tourists into thinking they stumbled across an amazing value sale. I know a store in one of our tourist capitals in NZ that is notorious for this - it's some sort of sale 24/7.

You can do very well in this industry without being deceptive - and really using deception is not a guaranteed way to success. Good copywriting, testing and a solid product/service that offers value to users will do much better than a deceptive PIN submit campaign.

10-29-2014 05:35 PM #4 laurenkeely (Member)

Hey guys thank you both for the info. I understand quality much better now. As far as ethics, I think I just need to keep myself out of the audience. I never fall for that kind of stuff and am a very resistant skeptic but my audience isn't like that. So I'll try to keep that in mind.

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