The Rise of Call Verified
Throughout all of the ups and downs of 2009 and 2010, one piece of the performance marketing puzzle has kept chugging along, almost enjoying its under the radar status, co-reg. It’s a world of dual personalities. There is co-registration and co-reg. They are two variations of the same mechanism. The world of co-registration is the lower volume world with companies looking to attract brands. It’s the pitch of premium (or at least respectable) content sites displaying additional offers during the sign-up process. Whereas co-registration almost seems to refer to individual offers or the methodology, co-reg is almost synonymous with those survey paths – the almost never ending stream of one co-registration offer after another, a mix of branded buyers who don’t know they are being shown in this way, and the clever arbitragers who have figured out how to make the data work.
In the beginning, the biggest buyers of co-reg were largely mailers. They purchased records for a certain amount and then looked to make it up via email. That evolved into more “dynamic co-registration,” basically forms within the survey path. Click yes, and the page expands looking for additional information. The holy grail of co-reg is, was, and always will be to some extent, branded buyers of data who will overpay or even underpay but don’t have any sort of performance metric. More recently, the world of co-reg has become the playground of the call verified space. Their ads look and read like many of the other more traditional offers, except instead of emailing as they might in the past or looking for additional information via the dynamic process, the data is shipped to call centers. There, a call center agent will look to connect with the person and “verify” the information that they entered. More often than not, in addition to simply verifying the data, they are selling the data. The record has shown an interest in an area, but not given enough information to become a full lead.
Stepping back, here’s how lead generation used to be.
In the “old” way, there was a landing page; the data was collected on that page and then sent a lead buyer. Traffic was driven to that landing page through any number of means, but after the fact, the process was pretty much the same. Fast forward to the new way.
Even this is slightly simplified. It doesn’t show the survey path or the number of hoops a user goes through before becoming data. It doesn’t show the percentage of data that didn’t realize it was becoming data, e.g., the fake job sites. More telling though, would be looking at the buyers.
Here we look at the interplay between the growth in volume of the call verified lead and the estimated level of understanding of that space by the buyers that receive the leads. While it seems there are only a handful of players that make up the co-reg volume, there are many more players who have been vying and finding ways to buy co-reg data to send to call centers. There are also complex data sharing relationships as well, making the call verified space hardly transparent. As an example, when a company says they do call verified, it’s not a question of whether they call the leads but the nature in which they get that data and what they say. The challenge now is really about the buyers and making sure there isn’t a backlash from them.
Unlike certain other methods, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with call verified. The potential scale has made it attractive. There are at least a dozen companies if not two dozen who generate more than $10mm per year. There are certain buyers who have certainly kept up. They understand the unique nature of call verified leads and could tell you the percentage of traffic they receive that is call verified. For this to continue, it’s up to the other buyers to do the same. As is the case with every traffic source, the biggest burden is on the sellers to keep it clean and sustainable. It’s no different than the rise of the flogs. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with an online advertorial. It was only a problem with what it turned into and how those doing it engaged in a race to the bottom. What we don’t want to see here and what we saw there is external forces shaping the future of a channel. Given the track record to date, I’m not sure how optimistic I should be.
