Click Tracking Is The Unsung Marketing Strategy For Lenders

If you’re in the lending industry and are not leveraging click tracking for your leads as part of your overall marketing strategy, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re doing it all wrong.

When used correctly, click tracking can be a tried and true ROI rocket and a proverbial best friend for lenders looking to capitalize on consumer lending trends to seize market share across the United States, and abroad.

Click tracking is the judge and the jury for campaign performance when monitoring spend versus yield. Click tracking also ties partnerships together and keeps publishers and lenders in check.

Most leading lenders that I know incorporate some capacity of click tracking. If you’re not using click tracking, it’s in your best interest to do so.

First and foremost, if you have data privacy concerns, a sound click tracking strategy for your leads with a product like Phonexa’s link tracking software quells any of that consternation. That cannot be emphasized enough. 

When web leads are bought, only data is purchased. There is no insight. Leads are accepted and rejected based on how the forms are filled out. With click tracking, you’ll be able to better understand whether or not a high-converting website and form was built to attract desired customers searching for a particular service or product. 

Once lenders identify there is more ROI with click tracking, then it’s imperative to A/B test the click tracking environment versus a web lead buying and Ping Tree environment. If you’ve already committed to click tracking and have a process down, you should always think about tinkering and evolving by going through an audit to identify if they are preferred partners.

A/B testing will let you see how much money you’re spending with third parties and give you a better purview behind the monetization efforts with each one. This way, you can start seeing how much you’re paying for leads, and how many of those leads are actually translating into business and converting into approved loans. 

Lead transparency can help deliver an optimized journey. It also leads to more answers and is part of a holistic and uniform marketing approach that any sound counsel should be suggesting. 

At the end of the day, click tracking should be a combined marketing effort that gives you more visibility for what the customer goes through. Click tracking also gives you more opportunities to make the process easier in order to convert more.

Click Tracking Cracks Down On Data Concerns, Eliminates Lead Remarketing

Whether it’s in the mortgage, personal, student or small business loan space, a lender’s predominant concern revolves around data breaches and data sharing, with emphasis primarily on the latter.

If you use click tracking, the publisher does not collect or own any of the data. They pass the content to the client, and the buyer owns the converted data.

The first thing lenders always bring up to me during conversations around data sharing is “who’s housing the data?” and “does anyone have access to the data?”

In the LMS SYNC product within Phonexa, there is a Seed feature. The reason why the Seed feature is there is because on a Ping Tree, you have all kinds of different buyers and campaigns. You’re pinging them to see if they want to buy the lead. 

There are companies in the ether that have buyers who are on Ping Trees that have figured out a way through technology to reject leads, all while keeping the consumer data even though they didn’t purchase it. They then re-market to the leads via email and persuade them to fill out a form. Eventually it could lead to a conversion. 

That’s a serious problem. You’re spending money and with potentially zero ROI behind it. 

With Phonexa’s Seed feature and function available as part of all-in-one marketing suite, it puts a stop to all of that. 

I like to encourage potential clients to submit a fake lead with their phone number and email, watch it go down the Ping Tree, and know that it was presented to a bevy of buyers. Then, if a lender who originally rejected the lead reaches out and tries to sell you a loan, you immediately know there’s been a breach because the Seed feature will expose that right away.

By utilizing click tracking, that concern of a lender goes away. No one can re-market to leads anymore because there is no data to be captured to begin with. It’s only going to you.

Phonexa has a vast arsenal of measures and protocols around privacy and security that makes data breaches and data sharing impenetrable. 

Every two months we hire a company to test our vulnerabilities and they try to hack our system to no avail. We also have data redundancies set in place.

With Phonexa’s enabled remote support, we can’t even see the data unless you allow us to enter your environment. To take it a step further, we even erase the data and post into client servers.

Click Tracking Amounts To Paying Less For Lead Conversions

By implementing click tracking, you can negotiate to pay less for a lead conversion that came from a click that eventually led to a form being filled out. That flow could cost less than simply paying for a lead with a form that’s already filled out. 

With lead tracking and distribution, users are filling out forms. You have no understanding of how many people are visiting your website. You only know when the form is filled out. By adding click tracking, you now get transparency and you’re seeing how many people are visiting your website versus how many are actually filling out the form. 

You’re starting to understand more of the user journey in its entirety instead of just analyzing data via forms. You’re getting an extra layer of consumer journey transparency.

Additionally, it can create a new commission structure that can be cheaper for lenders. Instead of paying on a CPL basis and taking higher risks because a lead is not 100% closable, if you pay on a CPC that is conversion based, it revives your marketing budget while driving more consumer traffic to your webpage. 

Inside The Publisher Purview Of Click Tracking

A publisher’s job is to sell consumer traffic to a lender’s offers. Their mission is to inform the world and to match them with the services a consumer needs.

You can effectively understand your marketing efforts, and if forms and websites are high-converting by using click tracking. 

If you’re a publisher, it can often be difficult to convince a buyer to increase their lead-buying budget. 

By diversifying your lead-monetization strategy, and incorporating a click tracking CPC model to your lead selling arsenal, you can effectively have lenders buy your clicks. It evolves into a conversion-based relationship. Instead of buying every lead, lenders can effectively pay less for a cost per click or only pay for the leads that are converting into form fills. 

As a publisher, you can negotiate two-tiered payout models on ones that actually got the loan and increase your revenue and strengthen your relationship. Buyers are comfortable with this approach as well. 

Anyone who’s clicking on a CTA is very likely a real-time candidate ready to pull the trigger. 

Click tracking does not require you to fill out a form. It helps you redirect from a publisher’s page to a landing page where you’ll find a form. 

Once the form is filled out, voila — you have your conversion. 

You can share more data on the user journey. If the conversation rates are high, you’ll get paid more. Getting the consumer data via clicks is an incentive for the lender to increase their appetite for lead spending with the publisher. 

For the publisher to get that information in real time, they need to place a pixel on the page. It helps publishers make better placement decisions on their site. Do you want your product to be at a certain eyesight level? Getting placed at the top or bottom shelf of a webpage comes with a fee.

Now you’re going to show your lender your page and share why you’re getting primo traffic. 

If budget is a concern, you could opt for the less-expensive option on the site, but that also comes with a less-converting rate. You can see which parts of the webpage are converting in real time. Once you study the analytics, the option is up to your discretion at the end of the day. 

Being transparent and sharing information in real time helps publishers drive more traffic to an offer. Based on the user journey, if someone clicks and then fills the form, and the pixel fires, you know that the customer had a great journey due to the ease of use of that form.

If someone clicks and doesn’t apply, it likely means that the form is too complicated, among other things that can affect conversions and revenue.

You can share that information with the buyer and advise them to make the user journey more enjoyable in order to create more conversions.

Conversely, it could also be that the marketing of that site is just not up to snuff.

It’s all about gauging to figure out why consumers aren’t filling out the form.  

Through transparency, you’re strengthening the relationship between the supplier and buyer, and are privy to consumer data and analytics. That helps you identify the best marketing and monetization strategies. 

That’s why the source information is critical to know what will work for you. Transparency provides a gauge for the quality of the traffic and where it’s coming from. 

Leveraging negotiations through conversation rates will allow you to boost ROI, and increase lead volume, which ultimately equates to higher revenue shares.