IAC - Nettra Media

Hi,

IAC judges!

Thanks for taking the time to assess our entry for the 2023 IAC Awards.

Problem

Banks and credit unions face a very perplexing issue: they cannot track the customer journey from their initial ad click all the way to opening an account or receiving a funded loan.

For example, if someone clicks on a Google Ad promoting car loans, they’re pushed to the financial institution’s website. When the customer is ready to submit a car loan application, they’re directed to the bank/credit union’s banking portal to handle credit applications and loan transactions. Redirecting the customer to this separate platform does not allow analytics to continue to track the customer. Without proper attribution, it’s impossible for a bank or credit union to optimize their campaigns based on which ads produced new loans and accounts.

Solution

Nettra solves this problem by leveraging fintech/martech solutions that track the customer from their ad click to an opened account or funded loan, all while respecting customer privacy. We then optimize our digital ad campaigns using this data, ultimately achieving an industry-best return on advertising spend.

Specifically, our bank and credit union clients’ average return on ad spend (ROAS) reached a spectacular 9:1 in 2022.

Client Background

Valley Strong Credit Union (VSCU) was founded in 1938 and has expanded to over 290,000 members and almost $4b in assets, with 28 locations between Central and Northern California.

Campaign Results

Nettra has worked with VSCU for over nine years, managed hundreds of successful ad campaigns and SEO campaigns, and built a website that won an IAC award in 2017 when they were called Kern Schools Federal Credit Union.

Nettra’s Google Search Ad campaign was already performing at a 24% CTR (click through rate) so when we applied our approach to managing ads with funded application data, the VSCU Google Ads campaign (Search & Display) increased the monthly ROAS to a peak of 14:1.

We started using funded application data to optimize their campaign in the middle of 2022 and the results were immediately evident (see graph, below).

“This campaign has the highest conversion rate I’ve ever seen...the ads are performing in the top 3% for financial institutions in the US.”

- Manuel Valencia, Senior Account Strategist for Google

What’s also been eye-opening is the performance of Display ads. Most banks and credit unions view display ads primarily as a branding tactic, yet some of our campaign’s highest-converting ads are Display ads!