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 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.

As you may have heard, Round Sky began generating leads over 6 years ago. Where we are as a company now is leaps and bounds beyond where we were 6 years ago.

We started with Search Engine Marketing first, PPC, SEO things like that, but PPC is where we invested most our time.

As we grew and evolved as a company, we incorporated affiliate marketing into our lead generation practices.  We added lead volume by creating our own affiliate offers, and buying/selling lead generated by our affiliates.

Next came purchasing leads from other lead providers.

And from that grew many lucrative, valuable relationships.

This year we started offering a List Management service, which is a GREAT way to increase the revenue from the data you collect, by the way. After you place a lead with a lead buyer, that consumer may be interesting in ancillary products.  We can connect them with those products, earning the lead generator (you) additional revenue.  All of this is in addition to the original lead sale.  Imagine earning all that extra revenue without affecting any of your relationships. We do this by infrequently contacting the consumer via email to see if they’re interested in other complementary products, and if they are we connect them with the appropriate vendor.

List Management proved to be difficult at first, but now it’s going ahead full steam and the partners who opted in for our Beta of this program are all happy with the additional income we’re generating for them, especially because we take care of all the work.

After List Management, the next item on our plate is Hot Transfers. Our plan is to allow Lead Sellers and website owners to place a phone number on their website so that customers, who prefer to speak with an agent on the phone rather than fill out an application online, can easily choose to do so. The customer will simply dial a unique 1-855 or 1-877 toll free number assigned to the website owner, and will get to submit his or her application over the phone, and within 5 to 10 minutes they’ll get a decision from a lender, and if approved will speak with the lender to confirm funding and other loan terms and conditions.

While this sounds like a simple concept, there is a lot of work behind the scenes that needs to happen. And we’re working on this as we speak. When ready a Beta invitation will go out to all of our existing seasoned partners; and companies who are not yet partners or have been with us for less than 6 month, will get to participate in the program as soon as the product comes out of Beta.

There is only a few months left in 2012, and we’re pushing to have the things in our pipeline come to fruition. So if you have Payday, or Insurance leads, please do contact us today. Because the sooner you contact us the sooner we can set you up with an account and give you access to our lead products and services.

So see you guys next time and thanks for reading.

-Nazar Brizinov, CEO

Hello, and welcome to the first edition of the Round Sky monthly newsletter.

Our hope for the newsletter is that it will provide our clients with a little bit of insight into what we’re up to here at Round Sky.

In this edition of the monthly newsletter we’d like to talk about what we do a lot of here at Round Sky… data mining! With large data sets, patterns can be found, and those patterns can be used to predict behavior.

Many companies in our industry do data mining, but a lot of it is a bit limited. And those who do datamining tend to stick to the simple stuff like:

1. Google looks at past and current browsing behavior to predict future behavior.For example if you’re searching for mountain bikes, over the next 24-48 hours Google will show you ads for mountain bikes on many of the future sites that you visit.…They are able to identify your interests by studying your browsing history, what you have searched for and clicked on.
2. YouTube looks at what you’re viewing now to suggest what you would like to view next.
3. Amazon suggests things for you to buy that are relatively similar to what you’re buying right now.
4. Etc…

Here’s where we changed things up a little:

When someone applies for a payday loan, we know a lot about them:

1. What zip code they live in.
2. If they rent or own their home
3. What their monthly income is
4. Who they bank with
5. etc.

Our ever eager team found a way to put this data to AMAZING use. It’s common knowledge that a customer who applies for one payday loan is likely to look for another loan sometime in the future. The value in this datamining situation is knowing WHEN the customer will apply for a loan again, and if they will be a GOOD customer.

Here’s where we started thinking outside the box:

First, we experimented with adding non-standard fields to the payday loan application, such as:

1. What is your favorite color?

   We used application data and loan results combined with the knowledge our CEO gained from skimming a few psychology books “back in college”, to determine that the customer’s favorite color matters a lot. .For example, we determined that the choice of “white” as a favorite color was indicative of whether the customer preferred vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream. And since our CEO likes chocolate an executive decision was made to show all the applicants who choose white as their favorite color, a list of bullet points as to why chocolate is better.

2. Draw a picture of what your mood will be tomorrow.

   If the applicant were to draw rainbows and butterflies, we would filter them out. Satisfied people tend to rely less on material possessions. On the other hand, if the applicant were to draw a vampire they are probably young, and in need of money to buy the latest Twilight merchandise (We’re team Edward by the way).With the increase of the popular DrawSomething app on the iTunes store, customers really responded to this portion and it absolutely befuddled Spam bots. As a result our fraud rate dropped to below 1% and we were able to place 99% of those incoming leads with buyers.One of our satisfied lenders has opted to switch from sub-id reports to focus on picture categories (Ex. “Bananas, car pictures and wizards are all converting very well, so if you can continue sending those to us we’re willing to give you better than first look pricing at our top tiers for those leads”). Our next step with this technology is to build a front end to let lenders dynamically bid on picture tags, and when this is in place picture boxes will be mandatory on all lead forms that post in to us.

3. How would you describe the difference between a bicycle and a train using a 7 syllable word?

   Customers who replied with “wtf” or “whaaaatttt” were clearly poor quality customers.Where as customers who used exactly a 7 syllable word as asked for we deemed intelligent; thus this consumer won’t be fooled and is usually a responsible borrower.

 

4. In essay form, describe your favorite kind of weather using numbers.If the customer leaves the section blank or puts zero, they demonstrate a fear of numbers and therefore lack the ability to keep track of money. A better customer would be able to formulate a pattern, demonstrating the ability to pay a lender back on time.

Next, we took these answers and began cross analysis:

1. If the consumer lives in a zip code with high insurance rates (data publicly provided by the US Department of Insurance)
   1. and resides in an apartment (if the consumer rents his home, 70% of the time this denotes they reside in an apartment complex),
   2. and banks with Chase,

   Then we know what they are living in a high density area, as this is where most Chase ATM machines are located, and as such are subject to peer pressure (from their neighbors) to party and drink A LOT of beer (high insurance rates), and therefore will come back multiple times for a loan.

2. If the consumer banks with Bank of America, who over charges for everything
   1. and is over the age of 40,

   Then we can extrapolate that the consumer is not cost conscience (as they’re with bank of America) and therefore they can get approved for a higher amount loan, and pay a higher interest rate.

3. If the consumer has a dot (.) or underscore (_) in their email address, we were able to deduce that they would typically be a late adopter of technology, as their desired email address without the dot or the underscore was already taken, therefore they probably do not own a cell phone. We then were also able to deduce that they have right now more than likely just entered a fake email address, because they probably do not possess an email address to begin with.

The Algorithm:

By combing thru the data by hand and with the help of lots of caffeine we have determined many significant patterns. We have taken our new found knowledge and programmed it into a single complex algorithm.

While our minds are capable of following only one thread at a time, our server farm is not as limited.

Phase One:

In phase one of our algorithm, it will establish the “quality” of the consumer based on the answer to the Essay question above; from that, it will have the ability to predict the time and place where the consumer will apply for a loan again (example output: Uncle Joe’s backyard, using a wireless laptop, on June 13^th at 6:03PM, because Uncle Joe needs his money back right now).

Phase Two:

In phase two our algorithm, will be able to predict its own behavior in predicting consumer behavior, and will start writing code for itself, so that it can optimize predictive capabilities. As this algorithm reproduces itself over our network with each iteration, we’ve decided to call it RoundSkyNet.

Phase Three:

In phase three, the algorithm will start predicting key numbers from larger data sets. These should allow us to quickly and accurately predict lottery numbers, horse and dog race outcomes, and professional sporting event results. Our mobile app should be launched around this time which will allow quick predictions of poker, black jack and roulette outcomes. Positive results in the testing phase convinced us to move our office to Las Vegas. Once we have cleaned out the casinos with our winning streaks, we will then cease publishing this newsletter, as we will be living in mansions by the sea.

Conclusion:

As we conclude this newsletter we would like to invite you to give us feedback and share your excitement over our new revolutionary technology. Contact Round Sky for Payday or Insurance leads that convert.

Thank you.

And happy first of April.

The Round Sky team will have a table at the Affiliate Summit East Meet Market, stop by and say hello!

I hope everyone had a great New Years break from work!

For me, it is definitely good to be back. So many goals to accomplish, so many new marketing ideas to try. 2010 will definitely be exciting and I look forward to it!

If you are interested in talking shop about leads please contact us — I will also be attending LeadsCon February 23-24 in Las Vegas so if you are interested in meeting in person please drop me line!

Have a great day!

Want to meet in person to discuss Payday Loans, Auto Loans, or New Car Quote leads?

We will be attending the Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles, CA on December 3-4.

Contact Us today to schedule a meeting!