Those that have followed the online performance-marketing space will know well the name LowerMyBills. Through a combination of market forces and sheer determination they became one of the web's most savviest, pervasive display advertisers and the company to which all others were compared (certainly in the mortgage lead generation space). With the mortgage market in the crappers, LowerMyBills can no longer earn the upwards of $20 million monthly they did in their prime. For them, as it has with everyone else who relied almost exclusively on mortgage, the time has come to diversify. In LowerMyBills' case, it seems that auto insurance is one such new vertical they are testing.
Display is tough. If you look across the lead gen landscape, very few verticals have scaled on display - education and mortgage being the most prominent. Auto insurance is huge on television, so it would seem that it has the right profile for web - everyone who has a car needs it, and consumers are often price sensitive not brand sensitive. Let's look at what we can gleam from LowerMyBills' execution.
The Ad:
It's a pretty typical ad; the ships move around. It's not a typical LMB ad though in the sense that it includes form field questions as part of the design and is not dominated by dancing whatevers.
Landing page:
This is a definite departure from the mortgage landing pages. The font is the same and the call to action arrow / font has been used on some of their (Experian Interactive's) ClassesUSA banners. It's the first landing page of theirs that I've seen that is a truly short form, though, and the graphical car makes it slightly more whimsical. Again though, the company has decided to use (as was the case on the banner) similar language in the call to action, get a new payment in this case. With mortgage, the call to action was calculate new rate. It worked well, but a case could be made that users filling out the form expected to see what their new rate is not be pitched a rate that fit the needs of the lead buyers. By saying "get new payment" they avoid some of the potential semantic quibbling from the mortgage banner language. Continuing on...
After you enter your zip is where it gets interesting -
Unlike mortgage, LowerMyBills is more or less acting like an affiliate. They aren't hosting the page, which also means that leads aren't being sold to their own network. In this case, Insweb is technically collecting the leads and selling it to their buyer network. Auto insurance has the potential to act like mortgage; as mentioned before users are generally price sensitive, so that paves the way for the lead generator to assign the lead to its clients as opposed to education where the lead generator can steer the user to a certain school but the school's branding plays a dominant role.
Now, the step two to Insweb isn't the only interesting thing. I clicked on the banner from a different machine on a different day, filled out my zip, and was taken here.
It's a completely different lander; not only that, it's powered by a different company. Instead of Insweb, this page is run by Insurance.com using the domain ComparisonMarket.com.
Overall, this experience had three surprises -
1) Seeing LowerMyBills doing Auto Insurance
2) Seeing LowerMyBills use a third-party for lead liquidity
3) Seeing LowerMyBills test between multiple external parties
It's hard to say whether LowerMyBills is doing this just to understand the metrics or as a backfill until they build their own network. Auto insurance is one of the growing verticals, though, so while the implementation is a surprise, their choice of verticals isn't, although compared to education and mortgage, auto insurance is a much longer form and pays much less per lead.
In case you are curious, here is an Insweb banner when they are advertising directly and the landing page. There are certainly some similarities.
Post Script - notice the exit pop from Insweb - not trying to get the user back but sending to their competitors.