Marketing Case Study: Payday Loans with T3Leads

In this case study I will release all of the extremely valuable data about my $200 per day Payday Loans lead generation advertising campaign – everything! The campaign was going well until Google stopped me; they told me that I need a financial services license to promote Payday Loans. I was promoting Payday Loans as an affiliate using T3Leads. T3 Leads is a pay per lead affiliate program, they auction the leads I generate to a network of lenders, but Google thinks me as the advertiser should also have a financial services license.

T3Leads is a good network. Their main strength is their payouts which range from $1.50 to $130 per long-form lead, with payouts depending on lead quality factors like home ownership, employment status, and outstanding loans. My average lead price is $22, but this is skewed downwards by bad keywords like ‘Loans’ and skewed upwards by good ones like ‘Check Advance’. I also have a rejection rate of ~67%, so my average earnings per lead is $22 * 33% = $7.26. Their weakness is probably my account manager, who is just average, he lacks thorough knowledge (for example, knowledge of IT) so a lot is left up to me. Overall they’re a good company.

I’ll start with the conclusions I made from the campaign then move onto campaign details and keywords and such.

Conclusions

• Mobile: Mobile visitors convert better than PC visitors, and they are far cheaper to target since there is less competition for mobile advertising. Of mobile devices, Android made up 99% of my mobile traffic when promoting using Google Adwords.
  

  Device	Visitors	Conversions
  Mobile	1744	98 (5.6%)
  Computer	119	0 (0%)

• Adwords: Google display network sucks for payday loans. Google search partners sucks for payday loans. Google search is the only method that works. I don’t have much data for display network and search partners since I paused then quickly after they proved to be junk.
  

  Network	Visitors	Conversions
  Google Search	1767	98 (5.5%)
  Search Partners	70	0 (0%)
  Display Network	27	0 (0%)

• Keywords: Broad keywords like ‘Loans’ suck (my earnings per visitor is $0.32), the lead quality is junk so the leads are usually rejected or paid only $1.50. This is likely because the lead has applied with lots of companies already. Keywords containing ‘Payday Loans’ are pretty good (my earnings per visitor is $2.20), these people are better leads. Obscure phrases like ‘Emergency Loans’ and ‘Check Advance’ convert really well with $5.00+ earnings per visitor. I guess they have not searched for payday loans before, so they are good quality leads.
• Weekends: Weekend visitors get rejected far more often, I guess the quality is worse since their psychology is different. They are in a different mindset than people in the week.
• Upselling: Any leads that get rejected should be monetized. By default that traffic disappears into thin air, but if you put in some effort you could monetize those rejected leads with a credit reporting offer or something (Convert2Media or W4 could provide those offers).

So as I mentioned, mobile traffic is far better than computer traffic, so I made a mobile site. You can see it here – Payday Loans Mobile Site, even rip the HTML if you like. It’ll look broken in everything but Android… This mobile site helps mobile traffic to convert a bit better than a normal site would. The site is pretty simple showing a short form on the homepage, then showing an embedded long-form from T3Leads on the second page.

Overall the campaign has the following conversion rates: 59% of visitors into short leads, 25% of visitors into long leads, 34% of long leads paid out, $23.55 average earnings per paid lead.

The most effective ad I found utilizes numbers in the heading and looks like the following. My campaign-wide CPC is $1.35, and would be more like $2.00 if I was targeting computers, but luckily mobile converts better anyway. The trouble is that if I drop the CPC I will move from the first page to the second page and then the lead quality falls (the visitor would have already applied at other sites).


I guess that only leaves keywords. Have I missed anything? Here’s the most recent leads –

Following is all of the keywords with either 2 visitors or more, or 1 visitor and some earnings.

Sorry that this page is really ugly, but hopefully you get some useful data out of it. Ask any questions that you have. If you want to make money out of this I’d recommend finding an advertising network that lets you target Android users, and target either financial keywords or financial websites. If you do use my data to make some money, do me a favor and use my link to T3Leads. It’s a good network.