2003-2006 I consider the “Golden Age” of Pay-Per-Click advertising. For Mortgage101 I built the online Pay-Per-Click campaign to drive online local mortgage leads. At the time, their business model was that of a super affiliate or aggregator – that is they drove online traffic to capture the data of consumers needing a mortgage and then they sold these mortgage leads to lenders.
Compared to a Google, Yahoo or MSN the traffic of a local business website, like Superpages.com, was small. However, by optimizing landing pages that matched local keyword targets, and creating custom local advertising text we were able to keep a very high conversion rate on that traffic. That conversion rate made my leads cheaper than leads they were purchasing anywhere else.