Things to know about 3rd party LEAD generators:

  1. 3rd party lead generators own several URLs that lead potential students to different Landing Pages, which are one page websites designed for Pay Per Click promotional lead generation and leads garnered in your geo-targeted area that are sold back to your school.These leads come from the same geo-targeted area where your school is being promoted, meaning you are competing with yourself when you buy leads from a 3rd party lead providers.
  2. Leads garnered by 3rd party providers are purchased for pennies on the dollar and then sold back to your school with a minimum of 300% mark up, making it very expensive for your school to capture quality leads.
  3. These same leads are typically sold to your competitors. This means that the leads become more difficult to close and make the average closing ratio of the leads 3-5%.
  4. When you pay them for leads you are paying for the following:
    a.   To drive search engine traffic to 3rd party Landing Pages to increase their search engine rankings on the return results of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
    b.   You receive no “organic” credit from the search engines for the click thru directly to your website for keywords you want your school to be found for when potential students are searching.
    c.   The 3rd party lead generators receive the “organic” credit.  They start moving up higher on return results which pushes your schools website position to the bottom of the search results.  Making your website invisible for the pertinent keywords that are being searched by potential students.

Let’s do a test:

Open a Google search browser.  In the search bar type: “career school Harrisburg pa” Once you find a Pay per click ad, click on it.  These ads typically open in a new window.  Now look at the browser bar and see if this is actually the website displayed in the ad OR if it’s a website address that has an extension with another company’s name in the browser bar? An extension of their URL typically includes the name of the company they are buying from.

If it goes to the URL that is an extension or really long URL it’s typically a 3rd party landing page that is trading off keywords in your geo-targeted area you want to be found by potential students doing searches. This is because some 3rd party lead providers are using “proxied” website pages. Meaning these are “look alike” websites that 3rd parties drive traffic to instead of driving traffic directly to your website.  These same “look alike” landing pages give the 3rd party “organic” credit from each click thru that is received. The main way to tell if you are being duped is to review the URL in the browser to see if it matches the website for your School.
Pay per click campaigns were invented for your school to promote keywords you are not optimized for on the internet. Google, Yahoo and Bing provide reports so you can see your cost per click, click thru rate and number of clicks directly to your website, helping you to evaluate spending. When properly managed your Pay per click ads are typically positioned in the 1-3 ad spots.  When these same potential leads are being directed to your website, they would be exclusively yours.  Yes, that’s correct you would not have to share them with several others career schools in your geo-targeted area and they would be better qualified leads, which will close at a rate of 60% higher than 3rd party leads you currently pay top dollar for.
If you are a career school that purchases leads from 3rd party providers AND  you will realize that all leads or click thrus go directly to the 3rd party providing you the leads, AND  that these same providers who have been trading on your school’s name via the internet for years…we can help.
For more important information that is a must have, please contact Jennifer Sultzaberger, President of Find It Media today at 717.364.9636.