Online Leads: Flight to Quality

By Andrew ColemanLeads are becoming a commodity. Quality leads are becoming a luxury. How you source your leads drives this important distinction.

Today, we see a flight to quality where agents are looking to get not just leads, but qualified consumers who want to speak to an agent. Short of your personal referrals or calls from the relocation department, the next best lead source is qualified live transfers (see sidebar). There are several companies emerging with this live transfer pricing, including Incredible Agent, Homes.com, Reply.com, and RealEstate.com.
We see the next highest quality leads being sourced from organic search. The benefit of this traffic is that the clicks are free. However, the old adage “there is no such thing as a free lunch” holds true here. In order to rank highly, you need to invest in providing good content on your Web site, have an appropriate Web structure and have people link to your site. That takes investment dollars and time.

Fourth on our quality index is paid search. There are four areas you need to perfect in order to be successful, including: expansive keyword list, good ad copy, diligent bid management and quality landing pages. If these terms are foreign to you, be sure to either read up on this or hire a firm to help you.
Partner- and lead generator-based traffic can be tricky, as each provider uses different techniques to acquire leads. Quality in, quality out-if these partners buy from poor sources, then you will be getting bad leads. Many of these partners blend their sources so the buyers of the leads only see a blend.

Lowest on the list is e-mail and co-registration platforms. Co-registration leads are generated via checked boxes after the end of a form you completed (for a completely different product that you wanted). That lead is then sold pursuant to the “fine print” that we never read.

It’s best to purchase qualified leads or traffic you source directly. If you buy leads from other partners, be sure to measure your quality and price accordingly. RE

LeadQual’s Lead Quality Index

Personal Referrals & Relocation Leads 20x baseline
Qualified Live Transfers 7.5x baseline
Organic Search Baseline Conversion Rate
Paid Search 85% of Baseline
Partners/Lead Generators 65% of Baseline
E-mail & Co-Registration 0% to 30% of Baseline

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