You may have noticed that the number of leads being presented to lenders is lower than usual. This is not due to a lower amount of leads available in the Round Sky system – April so far is seeing at least a 50% increase in leads from March.

The decreased volume in a leads presented is due to our inflow of new lenders and existing lenders raising price points (we’ve signed up more than 10 new lenders in the past month, each with multiple price points). The new demand is causing leads to be placed at higher prices than before and thus a lot more leads are being placed before they go through our full tree.

We understand and apologize that the limited selection is causing a lack of leads to be funded.

Actions we are taking to increase lead volume:

1. we’ve added more sales staff to attract more lead sellers

2. we’ve launched our new iframe solution

3. we are asking lenders to consider customers they’ve previously overlooked, like those who get paid weekly, monthly, or are on benefits.

In the meantime, it may be helpful to know that volume (and demand) is highest on Monday-Friday at 7AM-6PM PST. To improve your lead acquisition strategies you may consider buying off peak, before 7AM, and experiment with buying customers who get paid Weekly, Monthly, are on benefits, have a Savings account, etc.

Thank you for working with Round Sky.

As an affiliate manager I often get asked if we have mobile optimized offers.  Many payday lead buyers are buying mobile traffic, and many payday publishers are advertising via mobile.  Unfortunately mobile advertising has some catching up to do when it comes to fraud detection.  As it stands our in house offers are optimized for mobile.

I have received many emails over the past few days from networks concerned over mobile traffic.  Some networks are requesting that mobile campaigns be removed or paused.  Today the Online Lender’s Alliance highlighted an announcement from the Hill.  In the article it states that the FTC has released a guide to protecting consumers against fraud during mobile transactions.

The report prompts mobile companies to incorporate “privacy by design practices” that outline “strong privacy practices, consumer choice, and transparency into their products from the outset.” Doing so, the report says, “increases the likelihood of consumer trust in the mobile payment process.”

 

What practices are you implementing to help customers avoid fraud on their mobile devices?  Let us know.

If you would like to become a payday lead buyer contact us today!

We Affiliate Managers sometimes forget how complicated setting up new advertiser campaigns can be.  When you sign up, we want your traffic now, but you still need to set up campaigns, target audiences, create keyword lists, upload creatives, etc.  As a media buyer and email marketer I know how much time Adwords and email platforms take up.

As an affiliate network, there are certain things that we can provide to make the process easier for you, the publisher.  At Round Sky we have recently launched our new platform, making it easier for affiliates to navigate their way through reporting and link set up.  In addition to these platform changes, affiliate managers have been instructed on the needs of individual publishers, and how to best serve you.

When creating our new platform we considered these basic affiliate needs:

Ad copy: content that is approved by our network for your advertising campaigns.

Advertising Guidelines: established rules that define how a publisher can advertise our brand.

Offer Stats: conversion rates and epcs for offers.

Updates: information on what offers are performing best, and which offers are closed to traffic.

Unique URLs: ability to ask your affiliate manager for your unique URL.

Our affiliate managers can provide you with campaign optimization.  Who knows our payday offers better than us?  We can provide you with information like which days of the week convert best, which times, and geo-targeting data.  Reach out to your affiliate manager today to optimize your campaigns, or sign up to become a Round Sky Publisher here.

We’re excited about our new platform, and fulfilling publisher needs.  Contact us today to learn more.

I read an article today that hit home for me. At Round Sky we pitch new ideas every other day it seems like. There is always something we haven’t tried yet, want to re-try in a different way, or experiment with. The only way for a company to truly grow is to test new things.

That being said, most of these pitching “meetings” aren’t as formal as they probably should be. If you aren’t careful about the way you present an idea, it can easily be dismissed. I’m sure there are hundreds of great ideas that are disregarded everyday due to a lack of preparation.

Here is a list of the worst things you could see during a presentation as was posted by Imedia Connection:

“The way we’ve been doing this is ridiculous.”

“I haven’t thought that through yet.”

“No one has ever done this before.”

“I wouldn’t be the person responsible for this.”

“We’ll figure out how to gauge the success of this later.”

“We need to do this because so-and-so did it.”

“No.”

To read why to avoid these sentences visit Imedia Connection.

The Value of Transparency

When you require transparency from your affiliates you strengthen the relationships you have with other networks, advertisers and publishers.  The result is higher conversion rates, commissions, and quality leads.  Will traffic decrease? This should only take place if your affiliate is partaking in black hat tactics.  It is my experience that affiliates acting on the up and up are willing to share where their traffic is coming from, and how they generate it.  When you provide transparency to your business partners, you can earn new business, grow current business relationships, and prevent fraud issues.

The Resistance

When you manage a network many times it is necessary to work with other networks.  You may have in-house offers, but you may also acquire offers from outside networks.  Disclosing all matters and practices leaves many networks feeling uneasy since this can include commission structures and margins.  Others resist in fear of being snaked by the competition.  Providing domain or publisher information gives the competition direct access to your source of traffic.

Round Sky Network

At Round Sky we disclose what is necessary to conduct legal and ethical business while protecting the identities of our publishers and partners.  We take lead quality seriously, so fraudulent leads are always addressed promptly.

To learn more about the Round Sky Network Contact Us Today! To sign up as a publisher fill out the form here!

Working with publishers you become instinctive about what works and what doesn’t.  You can determine what offers will work best for their type of traffic, what ads/creative will work best for their campaigns, etc.  One thing I have learned to do is to identify if an affiliate should be running an offer or hosting a form on their landing page.

Selling payday leads is easy with Round Sky once you determine how you want to go about it.  I can’t tell you how many times a call has started out as a conversation about CPA offers, and led to a conversation about posting leads into our ping tree.  Some affiliates don’t initially know the difference, and others just aren’t aware of what their options are with our network.  Round Sky buys payday leads from affiliates, and you can generate those leads in a variety of ways.  One way is through our affiliate network.  A publisher signs up at roundsky.com, and they gain access to our CPA offers.  Another way of generating leads is by posting leads into our ping tree.  What’s the difference? How do you know what’s right for you?

If you want to place banner ads on your website, or include creatives in your email marketing campaigns, you should be looking for CPA offers.  At Round Sky we have a variety of payday loan landing pages you can link to.  The customer follows your unique URL to one of our payday websites, and fills out the application.  If you choose to run a “short-form” then you will be paid when a customer fills out the information on the first page.  If you run a “full form” then a conversion happens every time a customer fills out and submits the complete application.  The payout for short forms ranges from $6 to $14, while the payout from a full form runs between $35 and $100.  Affiliates are paid monthly for the commission they make off of leads submitted. Sign up to run our offers today!

When a publisher owns a payday loan website they can drive traffic to a form they create themselves.  As long as the form contains the required fields, the leads can be purchased by Round Sky lenders.  The advantages to hosting your own form on your website rather than send traffic to one of our landing pages, is that the customer never leaves your website.  The leads are sent to our ping-tree automatically, and payday loan lenders bid on the leads based on pieces of information we provide them with.  The lender is not able to see the entire lead before they purchase it.  When a lender purchases a lead from your website, a pixel fires, and the amount shows up on the network in your account. Sign up to sell your leads today!

If you are a publisher interested in working with Round Sky, contact us today!

CPA offers: Michelle McKinley

Michelle@roundsky.com

Ping Tree/Hosting a form: Harvey Sherifield

Harvey@roundsky.com

As some of you may already know, on January 22nd, Google will mandate that payday loan websites start disclosing the APR of the loans.

Here is the full letter of Google is imposing on payday loan website owners:

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We’re writing to let you know about a change to Google’s advertising policies that might affect your AdWords account

Beginning in the coming weeks, we will require all short-term loans advertisers to display the following prominently on the landing page:

1. Display the APR. Aggregators/lead generators may provide a representative APR range for their network.

2. Display the implications of non-payment, including the following:

- Financial implications (fees and interest)

- Collection practices

- Potential impact to users’ credit score

- Renewal policy information, including if the renewal is automatic and if there are fees associated with the renewal

- Aggregators/lead generators may provide sample implications from their network to satisfy the above requirements. Implications of non-payment should be grouped together in one location on the landing page.

The above must be displayed prominently, meaning the same font type, size, and color as the base text on the landing page. These guidelines apply to lenders, aggregators, and lead generators alike.

In addition, we are updating our policy on consumer advisories. Going forward, payday loan ads (a subset of short-term loans) will only be shown on Display Network sites that are related to payday loans. Ad serving in the Search Network will not change.

When we make this change, Google will suspend all campaigns identified as being in violation of our revised policy. Our system identified your account as potentially affected by this policy change. We ask that you make any necessary changes to your ads and sites to comply, so that your campaigns can continue to run.

We’ve given much consideration to our stance on the advertising of this content and the potential effect our policy decision could have on AdWords advertisers. However, as a business, Google must make decisions regarding the advertising that we accept. As noted in our advertising Terms and Conditions, Google may refuse any ads or terminate ad campaigns at any time, for any reason. You can view our Terms and Conditions at https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

We understand that Google is attempting to address customer complaints, and in general have the sites be more open and provide more information to the consumer about the product that they’re applying for.

The challenges for us as lead generators or aggregators is that we do not issue the loans directly; our clients are the ones that issue the loans and the APR of the actual loan may and will vary from consumer to consumer based on their credit worthiness and the lender underwriting.

Online Lenders Alliance has already brought up this point to the Google representatives via  their letter that can be found here.

The solution it then seems, and according to OLA what may be acceptable without violating the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) is providing a range of APR.

Something like this perhaps:

Representative APRs range from 260.71% to 1,825.00%*

*The APR is the cost of credit expressed as a yearly rate that relates to the amount of the loan received and
the timing of repayment. The range of values displayed represents the entire range of APRs associated
with loans offered by our participating lenders. Only your lender will be able to provide you with the
APR and other terms of your loan.

And also a APR comparison table may also help the consumer understand the APR in the 2 week time frame that it’s meant to be viewed as:

APR Comparison Table:

$100 extension of credit for 14 days would cost:

So there you have it. There’s still about 2 more weeks left before this policy is put into place.

We will keep you updated as far as the results of the OLA efforts to talk with Google and on the official word from OLA as far as how best to proceed with the APR disclosures for lead generators and aggregators.

Battle of the display networks.

WordStream recently did a study on which was more effective, Facebook or Google.  With my own disappointing experience with Facebook marketing, I wondered what the data showed.  The study graded the two networks based on: advertising reach, revenues/growth, advertising performance, ad targeting options, and ad formats.  According to WordStream, Google Display tied or beat Facebook on every account.

In terms of advertising reach, Google Display and Facebook both earned an A+ for advertising reach.  This could be attributed to Facebook’s one trillion page views per month, and Google’s 180 billion ad impressions served.  Google reaches 90% of internet users, while Facebook reaches 50%.  Facebook is the world’s largest social network with more than 845 million active users.  Google Display is the world’s largest online display advertising network consisting of YouTube, Blogger, and gmail.

In the revenues and growth category Google Display earned an A, while Facebook earned an A-.  Although Facebook earned $1.06 billion in revenues in the first quarter of 2012, they were down from the 4^th quarter of 2011 by 6.5%.  Facebook profits also fell by 32% between the 4^th and 1^st quarter.  On the other hand, Google Display earned $2.9 billion in the first quarter of 2012, up 1% from Q4 2011.  Google Display network profits also went up 0.7%.

Advertising performance is a major determining factor.  In this category Facebook earned a B+, while Google Display earned an A.  The shady news: Facebook isn’t publishing it’s average CTR.  Statistics show that the average click through rate for banner ads in the U.S. is .1%.  The average CTR for Facebook is 0.051%.  According to the Webtrends report, this is down 0.012% from 2009 showing a downward trend.  Google Display has an average CTR of 0.4%, higher than the U.S. average.  In some cases the CTR for Google Display is up to 36 times higher than Facebook’s.  Advertising rates rose 40% on Facebook in Q1 of 2012, while click through rates fell 8%.  On a side note, Google advertisers collect 20% of their conversion from the Google Display Network.

When it comes to ad targeting options Facebook received a C, while Google Display earned a B.  What is the reason for Facebook’s low grade?  Facebook lacks: mobile advertising options, retargeting options, partner sites, keyword-based contextual targeting.  If you’re anything like me, you check your Facebook page from your phone when you get a notification; however, there are no ads on the mobile version of Facebook.  Google Display lacks the ability to target consumers based on user’s memberships and interests from an established profile.

Google Display really trumps Facebook in terms of ad formats.  While Facebook provides only one way for ads to be viewed, Google Display provides four.  On Google Display you can choose to run text ads, image ads, ads in YouTube videos, or even ads in mobile or on games.  Variety earns Google Display an A in this category, while Facebook earned a D.

This detailed report while interesting didn’t really convince me of anything my own experience hadn’t already shown me.  As a media buyer I have used both networks, and seen the superior results that come from Google.  While I am all together not a huge fan of display, Google does seem to have the edge over Facebook.

If you haven’t tried Facebook marketing yet, did this blog sway you? Let us know.