The Rise of Call Verified – Why

In a slightly perverse analogy, we could argue that for-profit-education is the pornography of the lead generation world. We’re not saying that it is profane; what we’re really saying is that of any vertical, those successful in for-profit-education tend to be some of the most advanced marketers. And, like pornography, if there is a marketing strategy/methodology being used in lead generation, chances are the folks in education have either invented it or perfected it.

One of the marketing methodologies on which those in online education have come to rely is the call verified lead. We’ve taken some issue in the past with the call verified lead, because more and more the leads aren’t really being verified, they are being sold. Verification tends to imply confirming an intent, but today’s verification relies less on making sure the information entered is valid and more giving a gentle shove in the direction of maximum monetization for the marketer. Call verified leads aren’t evil, but the practice is reaching a tipping point where the volume being generated by call verified leads will either overload the system, or find a way to become part of the permanent landscape.

A question that we wanted answered was not whether call verified is good or bad, but why is call verified such an increasing percentage of the for-profit supply, and could understanding call verified in the context of education shed light on when / what other segments will start to see it being used next. Trying to get at the answer has us trying to create a framework for evaluating opportunity and fit.

Audience Saturation
This just tries to gauge the general demand

• Low (Untapped / Latent Demand)

• Maturing

• Very Saturated

Audience Size
How many people does the offer apply to?

• Run of network

• Moderate

• Niche

The two above deal with the potential. The below tend to be more about the traffic.

Availability of Media Type
What are you able to buy

• Affordable High Quality – High Volume

• Affordable High Quality – Low Volume

• Affordable Low Quality – High Volume.

• Affordable Low Quality – Low Volume

What you chose above tends to impact which of the below you receive.

Intent
Rather self-explanatory, but the issue tends to be direct correlation with cost (higher intent = higher cost) and inverse relationship with volume (low intent = more inventory).

• Really High Intent

• Medium Intent

• Little to No Intent

Targeting
You’ve got the offer. Now, who are you showing it to. Again, the better the fit, the more expensive.

• Ideal Fit

• Could Be a Fit

• Definitely not a Fit

Putting It All Together
If we think about the early days of for-profit-education, it looked something like this:
Audience Size – Large. Saturation – Low. Very good.
Media – Lots of High Quality that was undervalued and as a result not as expensive. As such, marketers could gain access to get high intent that was the right fit. Today the Audience Size is not as large, partially because of the saturation. From a media standpoint, there is not a lot of open pockets, and when there is only high cost media available to a saturated market, it means reaching those with intent and a good fit is very difficult. It’s certainly hard to do in scale. So, what do people do? They have to find a way to take correctly priced low quality media and look to make it act better than it is. That means, using the phone to try and take media that is not a fit and move the needle from little to no intent to just enough intent.

For call verified, the trigger seems to have been the shift from maturing to saturated combined with the decreasing quality of affordable, high quality media. Those that do not have to turn to call verified have some edge, e.g., better at search, but for the rest (and even for those who have resisted adding in lower quality) the phone is the only option. Unless you can manufacture more demand or more high quality, high volume, affordable advertising.