Quinstreets IPO, with all the industry hype, as fallen slightly from its initial public offering down to $14.59 today.

Many in the finance world have made comments that the IPO market is flat overall and QS could is simply feeling the affects of the flat market. I wonder if investors have a clear understanding of Quinstreet and their business plan. That goes without saying that it’s all documented in their S1 and the now public company will be disclosing information on a regular basis to investors moving forward. Even with that said, I think the confusion will continue to prevail with possible investors. Their level of vertical and service diversification enables stable growth within the company, but it also makes it confusing for the fundamental investor.

Read the full story

LeadsCon 2010 is right around the corner! Sign up if you have not already!

Along with LeadsCon we have the 2nd Annual Poker Tournament @ LeadsCon right around the corner too. The poker tournament is going to sell out this year so please sign up soon. (And that is not a sales tactic to get more sign ups, it WILL sell out soon)

The good news is that aside from the 1st place take home of $3,200 you will now have the chance to win $500.00 more, thanks to Leads360! Just announced on their lead management blog they will be holding a raffle for all the attendees at the poker tournament that will give you the chance to win $500. Pretty cool stuff. Frankly, I hope I win!

If you have not already signed up for the tournament, get your act together and sign up today here.

LeadsCon Poker Tournament

.

.

.

There are a few simple things in life that we must do to have a good life. Things like treating others as you would have them treat you or not committing murder, etc. lol The same applies with marketing. Yes, don’t commit murder, but even more obvious is to always implement some form of tracking on your marketing campaigns.

I recently heard a story of a VP of Marketing who insisted that a tracking phone number or a unique URL not be used in his direct mail pieces. He simply tried to track the lift of relevant results across the company. There are clearly a number of issues with this method of “tracking”, but the biggest problem is that you are not able to correctly identify what is working and what is not. Many companies during the mortgage boom wasted thousands of dollars on campaigns that they thought worked but were simply benefiting from excellent market conditions. Once those market conditions began to deteriorate it became even more important to invest in the correct marketing campaigns. By the time these companies implemented the correct tracking it was too late.

Read the full story

The fellas at Sparkroom sponsored a benchmarking survey put together by forprofitedu.com, which I believe is run by the founder of CUNet, which just acquired Sparkroom. The report surveyed 102 marketing professionals in the for-profit EDU sector and asked a number general questions that reaffirmed the evident speculations most industry insiders have been making.

The survey found that almost 70% of the respondents plan on increasing their budgets. Not all too surprising being that EDU industry could easily be considered counter cyclical to the economy. People are looking to go about to school to increase their chances of earning more income in today job market. Once the economy begins to improve, not instantaneously, but soon after those same people will remove themselves from the continuing education market. It is also my speculation that many will begin to drop out or end their schooling prior to completing their degrees because of their secure job situations. They simply will not have the need and will find something better to do with their $1k+ per month. Regardless of this speculation, schools are doubling down on the current boom. No brainer there, but they should be cautious and have a close eye on key market indicators. On the same token, and I think I mentioned this before, but if Obama’s efforts continue on to completion and provide funding for citizens looking to go back to school through the state school system, which is making the same strides of bringing classes online, could bring a market turn quicker then expected. So it makes sense that schools are looking to spend more money on leads. They are currently raking in money hand over fist.

Read the full story

LendingTree rumorville has been making some recent noise.

First, lets start with items that are not rumors. This Monday marked the last days at Tree.com for both the CMO and CTO. Both apparently resigned from their positions at Tree.com two weeks and are now on to bigger and better things. Good luck to them both.

These resignations are fairly strange in my opinion, though. To have two key positions resign on the same day leads people to make a number of speculations. Did they really resign or were they asked to leave? Is the company simply cutting employees with high salaries, regardless of the persons contributions? This would seem strange, in light of LT renewing its PGA partnership in a year where PGA viewership will be way down with the absence of Tiger Woods on tour. Who knows, maybe they received a significant discount for the sponsorship this year.

Read the full story

In this industry, specifically the lead generation industry, you don’t have to be around very long as a lead buyer to be able to start sniffing out the questionable lead sources. They claim to generate thousands of leads through SEO and Paid Search, but a quick glance at their websites stats tells a vastly different story. How do they get all those thousands of leads? It gets fairly easy and over time you learn to trust your instincts.

Read the full story

While all the hoopla went on today about the new iPad a smaller Apple application was released.

Today LendingTree released their own iPhone application called the “mortgage rate finder”. This new app allows iPhone users to shop mortgage rates on their phone. Frankly, not all that exciting. I am not really sure how you make searching for mortgage rates exciting and this app probably won’t make the top 25 list for free apps either, but I think the app can be useful for some.

Here are a few images of the application.

Read the full story

I think its been a little over 6 months or just about 6 months since Google started indexing Twitter and Facebook pages. Actually I think it has been much longer for Facebook, regardless there has been a more concentrated effort by Google to index the real time information. Since then it has been left to speculation on how they were going to prioritize Tweets and insure that they are relevant. Obviously this is quite an undertaking when you can imagine that their are not just millions of web pages being created everyday, but additionally million and millions of tweets happening every day and compounding the difficulty is the fact that tweets are limited to 140 characters. So there is not a ton of context available for Google to evaluate a tweet.

Read the full story

There are have been a number of announcements over the last two days by companies like Mortech, Leads360 and Kaleidico regarding their “partnership” with Google, more specifically Google’s Comparison Ads.  These companies are now “certified applications” for Comparison Ads and can provide some level of service for the lenders active on the comparison site.

So, coming across these announcements peaked my curiosity about what companies made the list of certified partners. Initially it was pretty tough finding this list, but I did come across a cached page that listed specific partners. I am not sure if this is a complete list, but it seemed like a recent list that now is no longer available.

Read the full story

Are they really “branded leads”? Better yet; Are “branded leads” really exclusive?

The EDU space is different then any other vertical slightly different then other verticals in how leads are captured. I am tempted to cross out the whole sentence and say that it is no different then any other vertical, but I will give the vertical a little credit and say it has a few differences. The key difference is the attention that lead buyers give to “branded leads”. Even though directories have been around in other verticals of ages, like the mortgage vertical, the attention to buying branded leads has never been so strong.

Read the full story

Obama may bot be telling Mom’s to go back to school anymore. No not literally, but there is a good chance we are not going to see as many “Obama Tells Moms to go back to school” ads from Classesusa.com.

Over a week ago DeVry reached out to its affiliates stating that these types of ads would no longer be tolerated and if a partner was caught using these types of ads the partnership would be terminated. My guess is that ClassesUSA got the notice first, for obvious reasons, and scrambled to take the ads down, because prior to the email going out I had noticed the ads were no longer popping up within Facebook and MSN. They seemed to be replaced by an even stranger ad.  Since seeing the ad multiple times I can no longer find it, go figure, but the ad, again by ClassesUSA the same creative source for the infamous LowerMyBills ads, included a random head shot of a Jesus look alike. Out of all the random photos Experian uses to attract the eyeballs of website visitors, this head shot is definitely the most obscure. So obscure I found myself not only be attracted to it, but staring at it. Did it do its job? In the world of banners and interruption based marketing, I guess you can say it did. Whether or not it is driving quality clicks and subsequently quality leads, I am not convinced and frankly wouldn’t know first hand anyway.

It would be fun to know what pulls more clicks Obama or Oprah. What do you think? I say Obama.

.

.

.

Big news out of Toronto today. CUnet picks up an excellent add on to their services, Sparkroom. Congratulations to the Sparkroom team and CUnet for seeing Sparkroom as an excellent addition to their company.

Comments about the acquisition, made by Jamie McDonald, can be found here on the Sparkroom blog

Press Release:

PARAMUS, N.J., and TORONTO, Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ — CUnet, a subsidiary of Nelnet Inc. (NYSE: NNI), announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Sparkroom, a leading provider of enrollment marketing automation and lead performance management solutions. The parties anticipate closing the transaction on February 1, 2010.

Sparkroom provides business intelligence and lead delivery software that helps organizations immediately improve marketing efficiency and increase profitability by managing, measuring, and optimizing lead performance across all direct response marketing channels. Sparkroom’s Lead Performance Management product suite, which includes LeadDeliver, LeadIQ, and Lead Market Analytics, enables direct marketers in higher education to:

Read the full story