The Transportability of Leads
Recently there have been a number of great blog posts on the transparency between lead buyers and sellers (For example: this Transparency and Love post at LeadCritic). I want to add a few thoughts to this issue by discussing the relationship between transparency and transportability in the education space.
One of the things that has always struck me about education versus other verticals is the lack of transportability of leads. Transportability is a measure of how many buyers can make use of the product being sold. A market that deals with highly transportable products (like Google keyword clicks) tends to be very efficient because of the number of buyers participating. A market that deals with non-transportable products (a silent propeller for a submarine – I had to get the Navy reference in) is typically not efficient.
So how does transportability vary across different performance marketing verticals? To get a sense you can look at three transportability factors: brand, product and geographic transportability.
The end result is that the education vertical is dealing with what is essentially a non-transportable product (the prospective student inquiry) that once generated, schools aren’t typically competing for. This lack of transportability prevents competition on the individual student inquiry level and inhibits creation of an efficient marketplace.
In my next post I will give some thoughts on how the lack of transportability in education impacts the transparency debate.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Inquiry Generation Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
