[Transcript] Insurance & Banking 2016 Insights – Bing Ads Webinar

Greg Woods and Laura Smith from Bing Ads team share their valuable insights and findings from two of the verticals studied, Insurance and Banking. Learn about how CPC, CTR, mobile growth has evolved in comparison to Google.

You can view the video here.

The transcription of the video is as follows:

Introduction
Hi guys. Welcome for joining. This is the Insurance & Banking Bing Ads webinar. My name is Greg Woods. I’m a Team Search Lead at Mi9 Bing Ads. And joining me is Laura [inaudible 00:20] Smith.

Laura: Hi guys. Thanks for joining the webinar. Great to have you here. And yes, as Greg said, I’m co-presenting the webinar today. So my name is Laura [inaudible 00:33] Smith and I’m the Partner and Account Manager here at the Bing Ads team, so I work with a lot of ad partners and I have also been in the Search Account Manager [inaudible 00:41], working with a lot of ad customers too. So thanks for joining and we’re going to kick off now.

So we’ll just cover some housekeeping for the webinar. So if you’re having any issues, let us know in the Q & A book, if you are having any issue hearing. Also if you have any questions, please type them in the Q & A book, happy to take these throughout the presentation, but we’ll also have about 15 – 20 minutes at the end to cover up additional questions, but please type them there.

Before we get started we would like to first get you acquainted with the webinar platform we’re using today. So you’ll be able to access this webinar both on desktop and on mobile and tablet devices, so feel free to log in from whatever you are using and comfortable with. You could also expand the widgets on the screen as you like, especially if you want to see the slides in a larger format. And it’s a very interactive session, so if you want to either ask questions, as mentioned earlier, and you can type it in the Q & A widget that you’ll see on your right of your screen.

So any questions that come to us within confidentiality, and we’ll stop to share the responses as we go through the next hour. Specific account questions, please do feel free to mention your [X IDs] or brand names and we’ll follow-up with you post the webinar. You can also access the full list of resources relevant to the topics we’re talking about for the next hour by clicking on the links under ‘Key Resources’. We strongly urge you to bookmark these for ease of access for later on. Most importantly, many of you will be wondering if you can get your hands on these decks we’re presenting and of course, we’ll be sharing these after the presentation, so you can download the deck by just clicking through on ‘Download Deck’ button under ‘Key Resources’.

We’ll also be recording the webinar, if you want to share or if you know someone who missed it or if you can’t stay for the entire duration, and finally you can connect with us on social media by clicking on the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn logos to the left hand side of the console. We now kick off and I’ll hand it back to Greg, who will take us through the first section.

Greg: Great. Thank you Laura. So quickly we’ll just go through the agenda for this morning. And just bear with us as we change slides, as it can be a little bit of a lag. So the agenda for today will cover off the Insurance verticals first, concentrating on the Car, Health and Travel sub-verticals. Next we’ll go a little bit deeper in the Banking vertical, talking specifically to credit cards and personal loans.

So first off, we’ll cover Car Insurance. So as far as the overall, we’ll cover off consumer attitudes in growth within the sub-verticals, so that includes search growth, trends including average CPC, CTR, and mobile-growth. We’ll also look at some engagements in bidding. Next, we’ll cover off keyword analysis with some CPC comparisons and we’ll look at the target audience for the Travel Insurance per se.

So just an overall snapshot of the Car Insurance vertical. We are forecasting 2.5% annual growth from 2015 – 2016. This is being driven by the number of motor vehicles entering the market and the growth of the income, proven income with consumers. What we found from a consumer attitude perspective, is that consumers are being a lot more, quite savvy, shopping around for the best prices on Premium. So this we discovered that 24/7 multi-channel management of insurance as opposed to rely heavily on the reputation of your brand, is going strongly into the minds of consumers. So consumers are more empowered than ever, through multiple channels. 64% of consumers are using the Internet as their first point of contact to research companies and products.

Taking you through, sort of, the consumer journey, 71% of consumers had a brand in mind before actually beginning their research. However, only 34% of these consumers still preferred that specific brand at the end of the buying process. So 74% are current customers, who are brands; 53% actually trust the brand that they had in mind before entering the consumer journey and then only 38% feel that they have actually had the best deals on offer presented to them.

So just off the back of that as well consumers are doing a lot more expensive research past that initial search phase, and going on to research an average of 5 service providers, 4 additional quotes, impression comparisons – 49% of those are coming from actual comparison sites specifically. So next we’ll cover off the actual growth trends of the vertical.

So look, all that Bing search watches were to do as far as you’re getting what Google is from a mobile-traffic perspective. However we can’t see that searches and clicks have both significantly increased, you know, from the mobile space. As far as the overall growth, we’re looking at 2% in the Car Insurance sub-vertical, with a little bit of a decrease of overall monthly CPC averages, sitting at about -8%. From a CTR perspective, we were going to sort a bit more detail, but on the next slide, where it’s pretty flat, sort of, you know, near at about a 2% with the monthly average of 6.49% average CTR in that vertical.

So over this slide we’re looking at the engagement in bidding. As far as from the month perspective, June showed the highest month from the CTR perspective, which is 15.5% higher than the monthly average at 6.49% of key engagement focused months and the Car Insurance vertical are called back to be January, June and September. So things that can impact this sort of engagement is people historically buying, sort of, new cars or a changing their vehicle at these certain points of the year.

The lowest from the CPC perspective was in April. It’s 6 dollars and 43 cents, which is 6.5% lower than the monthly average of $6.87 so as far as looking at that opportunities to bid up, you can see that from July through all the to October, the average CPC increasing a little bit more sort of competition within the auction happening, which is why you’ll see a decrease in CTR. So looking at other optimizations such as ad copy, bid adjustments or something, that we definitely recommend.

And next we’ll move on to the actual, more in-depth to the keywords searches. Actually we’re going to stop there, so if you can just share with us what events are you optimizing your car….it should be Car Insurance campaigns for a variety of those, kind of be online. Actually we might just move on because we’ve this slide a little bit out of order. We can go back to that slide when we cover off the Travel Insurance.

So next…sorry about that everybody. So here we’re just looking at the top keyword thing. As you can see, there is a healthy balance between actually brand terms and tech terms. This is something we wanted to specific call out because we know that there are large amount of advertisers who on Bing are only bidding on brand terms and so that’s why it’s important that you also include those key head terms when….to maximize your exposure within the sub-vertical.

And here’s a snapshot of the CPC comparisons with Google, so as you can see, all op. within the sub-vertical were about 1.8 times more cost-effective than what is being shown on Google. We provide much lower CPCs and higher potential ROI for queries that are driven in the Car Insurance vertical. I’ll let you guys sort of stick with this slide for a second, but key callouts from the keyword perspective or the value car insurance keywords, which is the most cost-effective keyword from the CPC comparison on Google. On Bing, sitting at $11.59 whereas Google, it’s $28.34 per click. Other, sort of, competitive search terms that just compare car insurance in car insurance quotes are significantly less than what they are on Google, so a great opportunity to provide better ROI for your advertisers with these specific campaigns.

And here is a snapshot of the Demo, so key callout here are the geographic. As far as the geographics put by states, it’s for clicks, so most of the click activity final surprise is coming from New South Wales and Victoria, depending on how you guys have your accounts put out. There also is a significant opportunity though in Queensland as well as in W.A. From an all out view, we skew a little bit more female – 52% and in the age range of 35 to 49, which is fairly consistent with Bing’s all up in Demographic.

Laura: Thanks Greg. I will just jump in there because we had a question on line. So the question was: Do you have any state-based information with relation to Car Insurance? So I think this slide supports this, but could you get a bit more context there?

Greg: Yeah, sure. As far as the state-based data, I would recommend you getting in touch with your account manager and we can do a much more detailed deep-dive to the amount of volume on the specific keywords that you are looking at. This is an overall snapshot of the sub-vertical itself. And just from the slide, from the information that we have available, we’re not able to get very granular. So I hope that answers your question, but I definitely recommend getting in touch with your account manager to have more of a deep-dive into that query.

So just key learnings, key callouts here, we have gone over the customer journey with the seasonality events, the keyword in bidding, so again, that Bing keywords in the Car Insurance vertical is 1.8 times super than what it is in Google and offering a better ROI and we skew more female between group age range of 35 and 49 in this vertical. So recommendations at this stage are to spread evenly throughout the year while focusing on key times for your brands; optimizing bids at high performing times as the auction increases.

Keep in mind you are still giving better ROI on your competitive keywords. If you’re doing, sort of, demographic targeting at all, look at customized ads for your specific target audience and then also have a good mixture of brand and generic keywords in line with the search behaviors and trends within the vertical. And lastly, please use incremental bids for mobile, tablets in searches, as we see increased volume. And I’ll just pass it on to Laura, who will be covering off the Health Insurance.

Laura: Thanks Greg. Yes, so I’ll be covering the sub-vertical Health Insurance today. So what we’ll cover is an overview, then look at key points around the seasonality and growth of the last twelve months, then look at a few things around engagement bidding and where these things peak seasonally throughout the year and what months are really great engagement months. We’ll then look at a bit of a keyword analysis, specifically what are the top keywords in this vertical and then how CPCs can compare from keywords but also across other search platforms such as Google.

And then we’ll have a look at our target audience, that will include demographic insights and then finally device insights and how this differs over verticals across mobiles, desktop and tablet. So this is the slide of an overview, just a couple of key callouts to look at, when we’re thinking about Health Insurance. So firstly, this sub-vertical, it accounts for 55% of overall performance from the top-level insurance vertical, so more than half is just fitting the Health Insurance advertisers and a couple of things to keep in mind, so you really need to understand and think about what’s important to the customer and what they are thinking of when they are doing their searches and what’s top of mind for them?

So a couple of key dates that really impact these verticals include the 1st of April which is when the annual price rise occur, but also this push to avoid the medicare levy before the 30th of June. So a couple of things that are top of mind for consumers and what real impacts, things like search volumes and engagement with your ad. So this slide is looking at seasonality and growth, so we’re going to take a look back to the last two years trends and compared to 2014, in the year of 2015, searches for Health Insurance actually grew about 4%, impressions grew by 125%, so quite significant and clicks grew by 28%, year on year.

So this is very visible tracking clicks for the two key dates that I just earlier mentioned, so again April the 1st, you can see a spike for both the years of 2014 and 2015 and then again in June, when that medicare levy is going to occur at the end of the financial year. So when you are about to seasonality, the key months to focus on come up in June, around these facts in volume and in anticipation of any insignificant increases in those impressions and clicks, so in order to maximize that and capitalize on that additional volume, you won’t really want to hang around those key dates for your accounts.

So other periods of the year, you can see volume is slightly more consistent; however we did see a downwards decline around December in both years and this is again, taking into account seasonality, the time of year majority, more info, holidays and more around the Retail vertical, so consumer focus is shifting a little and down, shifting away from what we would expect this Health Insurance focus. So some recommendations to capture this additional peak traffic, we’ll cover this off at the end of this section. We have another panel question, which is again more related to the Travel-related purchases. I think some of these…may have got, shuffle around a little bit.

So we might cover this again later, but really it’s asking around when you use your mobile phone for Travel-related purchases, so again, this is totally, something to think about when you’re thinking about Travel, but it can also relate to any of the verticals, when you are using your mobile phones for paths researching Health Insurance, Car Insurance and then also Travel, so what this would most relate to, how this one relates to your purchase behavior. And what the poll answers, come back on that question. It’s really around when someone is trying to book something last minute and that can again apply to any vertical specifically Insurance, Travel and then even in credit cards which we’ll cover off later on.

We’ll now look at engagement & bidding trends for Health Insurance. For the trends, impacting this vertical specifically for click-through rate and CPCs, and looking at these across the last twelve month period, specifically 2015, for the highest click-through rate looks down to be upto 14.32% and then average monthly was found to be 10.5%. For the peak months for click-through rate were actually occurring in March and July and February, again, related to those top-of-mind consumer trends around key dates and how that’s impacting the Health Insurance.

So in 2015, the low CPC actually rates $3.07 and the monthly average was found to be a little higher at $5.22. The bid for peak seasonal volume again was March, June and July, so peak CPC is really occurring around, not only the increase in volume, but also the increase in advertiser activity and slightly driving up those CPC costs. The next slide, we’re looking at the top keywords theme around Health Insurance and what we can see here is that the top themes are mostly made up of the brand keywords. So some of these Bank Bupa, Medibank, and iSelect, but is also a mix of the top generic keywords which include health insurance, compare the market which is actually quite granulated and health cover.

So seeing that there is quite a mix of brand and generic, but brand taking it up, as the top keywords, it’s really really important for generic and the brand keyword strategy in your accounts and we’ll touch on this more in the recommendations later on. Here we have a snapshot of keywords CPC comparisons across Bing and Google. This compares the top generic keywords from December 2015 across the two platforms and overall, Bing is found to provide a much lower CPC across these keywords, resulting in a very cost-effective use of the advertiser’s budget. So the value comparison here of this set of keywords is really between and it’s quite high, between a 107% to 327% variance. So quite a high variance between those CPCs on the platform.

For the advertiser, this means a high potential for ROI which is really driven by key insurance keywords. This is an example of some of those keywords and looking at the same, you can then expand onto longer-tail and shorter-tail versions of those keywords to really maximize that variance in CPC. So now we’ll look at some demographic insights with the Health Insurance vertical and demographics, I find, are really a significant point of interest from advertisers, customers, partners – you name it. So a really great point of interest is, people always want to know more about the demographics, but this is a really great snapshot and I’m just tending to the demographics of any vertical, can really enable the advertisers scroll down and target very specific sets of their customers.

So here, in terms of gender, the Health Insurance clicks would skew towards female, 61% of users and mostly from the…the highest amount were coming from the age group 35 – 49 whereas clicks were skewed in a slightly, almost half of that was male, with 39% and the age group, high age group was a little older 50 – 64 [user]. So in terms ofage group overall, the largest age group population was found to be between 35% and 49 % when we are considering both male and female and then that’s quite equal resource with the age group of 50 to 64-year olds. That makes upto about 28% of overall audience.

And then that’s followed by the slightly younger age group, so 21% of 25 to 34-year olds and then only 10% for the 18 – 24-year olds. So we would then also look at clickshare by the….showing states and this is very much in line with the average Bing user demographics. So the list of users across Australia is very in proportion to the overall Australian population. So vivid and [inaudible 26:35] steps of the population feedback, where we also find out denser sets of users. And we can see that it also applies to Health Insurance segments. So highest clicks coming from New South Wales with more than 30% being here, and that’s followed by other heavily dense populated states Queensland and Victoria, followed by Western Australia and South Australia and finally Tasmania, which only has less than about 5% of the audience coming from there.

So we now look at the device analysis for Health Insurance sub-vertical. So in terms of year-on-year growth, by device, this has been most significant from mobile with 281% increase in impressions, a 131% increase in clicks and a 139% increase in spent. So this growth following behind mobile is then from desktop and tablets, so desktops still getting quite a significant increase and nothing quite near mobile. The trends in device usage over the course of the week are quite as expected, so looking at each device, the trends kind of come up in and is quite expected of how we would expect users in their behavior to change over different times and days of the week. So firstly, 72% clicks on desktop are occurring Monday to Thursday; tablets account for most clicks on Sundays and this is mostly after 5 p.m. and mobiles are most used by between Thursday to Saturday, so when the business week is, I guess, winding down and the weekend is picking up there, using that mobile device more frequently.

Greg: And just quickly Laura, we just have a question from the audience.

Laura: Okay, great.

Greg: So the question is: How are you seeing long tailed searches play a role in the Health Insurance vertical?

Laura: Yes, so I think it’s same when we look at things like what are the top keywords, brand versus generic, but also the keywords, how they compare across different platforms. It was real mix of short tail and long tail, but the question is really, how does long tail play a role? It’s going to balance out your CPCs, so though we expect the shorter tailed more generic keywords to be a bit pricier, once they are…quite cheap on the platform, mixing that with your longer tailed generic keywords as well is going to really bring down that CPC and boost up your ROIs because the cost is more effective on the longer tailed keywords.

So it’s very important to not only focus on those really top keywords that are going well for those verticals, but what are the keywords that are going to bring performance-specific keyword account and to make sure you are covering those long tailed, is going to really do it at your volume and ensure you are getting and covering all that audience in search volumes.

Greg: Thanks for that.

Laura: So, we’ll just wrap up the Health Insurance piece. So, if you were looking at the key learnings from these sub-vertical, so I’ll just call a few of these apps, so Health Insurance searches and clicks most significantly increase or increase over the year around March and June. And this is also when engagement in that is highest, through March, June and also July. CPC is the lowest in March and found to be up to 3 .2 times cheaper than those that are priced on Google. The key audience, demographic audience, for this sub-vertical are females between 35 to 49years old, they make up 61% of total users, and mobile clicks have significantly grown from 2014 by 28%, and these searches occurring mostly in the evenings.

So we’ll cover a few recommendations here. So when you’re optimizing for any Health Insurance account, it’s important to keep these in mind and it’s also important to cover off these kind of top line recommendations, but also dive deep and hear account manager on what more you can do to really build traffic across the users for the account. So in line with the key findings for Health Insurance, it is important to optimize and to remember to include optimum bids in budgets, and maximize the key seasonal months as mentioned, which were March, June and July, and really capitalize on that additional volume throughout the year.

Increase your user engagement by making use of the targeting features, and this is a great call out for demographic targeting, so using these along with targeting by device, ‘Time of day’ targeting, etc., you can really deliver a highly [chaoted] ad message to your key market segment. And it’s a great way to add that extra competitive edge to the account. And ensure you are bidding on your brand terms, it’s really important, as well as your generic term, so we also are able to apply your trademark, if you have one, and doing this, wherever possible, you ensure you’re receiving the lowest possible CPCs and those clicks aren’t going to your competitors. So I’ll now hand it back to Greg. He’s going to cover Travel Insurance.

Greg: Thanks Laura. So, with the Travel Insurance, we’re going to cover off just a brief overview of the sub vertical, some seasonality in growth trends. Again, the engagement in bidding slide, also with the keyword analysis, the target audience, and with this sub-vertical we have some device data as well that we can share. So, jumping right into the overview, it’s no surprise that Australians are heavy travelers. We’re forecasting for this to increase this year as well with departures oversight from 2015, we saw that increase 6%, so 5.5 million travelers from Australia travelling overseas. All up, that represented 83.3 million overnight trips last financial year. This is really important just to show you sort of how many people are the people that would be a potential Travel Insurance customer.

So, things to consider while you’re travelling overseas is the medical costs; not everywhere in the world has ideal medic, or I guess, hospital safety concerns, so having that in the background or in the back of your mind, so with medical costs to or pushes Australians to choose safety. Other global events that are happening can impact sort of how people buy and look at Travel Insurance as an option when they’re travelling overseas. And I guess the key thing that call out, and this is something that we’ll see with the trends, is that Travel Insurance is still largely a last minute purchase for customers. Sometimes it’s included when they’re purchasing their overseas trips, but we still find that it is being done separately and just before they embark on their overseas trips.

So, with the device trends, it’s primarily still on desktop computer with a total average of just over 10% of Travel Insurance queries occurring on mobile device, and as far as search volume goes, the generic terms, such as ‘Travel Insurance’ is about 10 times higher than branded search terms with the exception of ‘Travel Insurance Direct’ at just under five times what the generic ‘Travel Insurance’ query is. So, we’ll cover off the seasonality and growth here. This is a snapshot year-on-year. 2015 was relatively flat compared to 2014 with a spike in this reactivity with the world cup. This year has a few key events to call out with the year’s Football Championships in France in June, and also the Summer Olympics in Brazil in August. So, as far as, you know, key events, I’d say that it’s a [inaudible 36:15] forecast.

The impact that Summer Olympics is going to have from a volume perspective, but that is something I would definitely recommend planning towards with CPCs, budgets and volume numbers inferred. Referral monthly average were showing about 415,000 monthly searches in this sub-vertical; significant increase as far as impressions, so it’s a year-on-year growth of about 28% with a 11% year-on-year growth per clicks. We can just go to the next slide.

So, again this is just from 2015, we’re looking now at the highest CTR month. So that’s January; again a high travel period through to, let’s say, the start of winter. Key engagement-focused months would be January, March and July. Just going back to the CTR, the highest month – 13.27%, is roughly 50% higher than the monthly average. CPC has increased about 8% from the lowest CPCs, the average CPCs that’s occurring in July. Again the bid up months will be January, March and July, and for 2016, keep in mind the key focus areas as far as events, mainly the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.

So next going to the keyword themes, no real change here as far as the mix of brands and generic terms, as far as what represents the majority of the auctions. As Laura and I have previously stated, it is truly important to actually have a really good mix of both brand and generic term for your…in your search campaigns. So, here is a snapshot of the CPC comparisons. We found that this is probably the biggest differentiator between Google, looking at 2.2% more cost effective. Again, lower CPCs and higher ROI potential, mainly driven around the Travel Insurance reviews and the Travel Insurance comparison keyword queries. So again, please keep that in mind when you’re bidding on generic keywords as well as your brand terms.

So five demographics split by state – the clicks generally… again, Eastern Seaboard, Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. There is a little bit of a higher propensity in WA and some of the other sub-verticals. So if you’re sort of splitting it out by state, your targeting, it might be worth looking at some bid adjustments for the specific states just to make sure you’re obtaining the best position. With the overall demographic, again skewing which is ‘Female’, with an average age range of 35 – 49, that represents around 20% of the volume share from the age perspective. I guess it’s evenly split with the last 50% – 64% too. And all are across say 25 – 64, that would represent 59% of the search volume from the demographic standpoint.

So from a device perspective, we are seeing increased clicks across all devices with the biggest increase in mobile – 274%; however if you look at sort of the difference between smartphone, tablets and computer, we’re still showing a high propensity of clicks coming from desktop computers. As far as the CTR trends, this is something that we can go a little more in depth later, but as the auction sort of increases, the CTRs are decreasing a little bit.

So just key call outs, mainly around the vertical being 2.2% cheaper than what Google is, the CPC is lowest in January, a lot of times, while also the highest CPC here, so probably the best time to look at increased budgets and bids. Key callouts as far as seasonality with the….again, the readditional Olympics, and as the volume increases in the mobile space, look at optimizing towards mobile devices with your campaigns. So with the recommendations here, we think that, I would add that we haven’t already covered off is make sure that all your accounts are tagged with the ‘UET’ tags which enable search in marketing.

This is really good to do from the Travel Insurance perspective, because you can be getting people who are, know that they have a trip coming up, but waiting till last minute to purchase and re-engaging with those advertisers when they are looking to convert and making the decision on choosing their Travel Insurance provider. So all these would be again provided at the end of the presentation. If you do have any specific [ask], please reach out to your account manager and they will provide any deep level optimization recommendation. And I’ll just hand it back to Laura, who will be going through the Banking overview.

Laura: Thanks Greg. So I’ll be covering off Banking quite per se before I jump into credit cards. So just some key callouts here and with the key metrics here, it’s really protecting your brand terms. So if the bank’s brand terms, I mean, just over half of the searches are within Australia, so you can see there, just probably of a half in that group. So it’s very important to bid on your brand terms, as it’s not only delivering more clicks, and in some cases, it’s…32% more clicks than accounts with just generic keywords bids only.

So that can be upto 32% more when you’re bidding on your brand terms as well. But it also means that there is, you have clicks going to your competitors, and a couple of interesting points to call out here on this slide, so Australian owned banks are receiving the majority of their searches on Bing and [inaudible 44:54] such as personal loans and credit cards contain brand terms, so again, bidding on their brand terms, that’s what is being made up, as part of the search.

So this slide looks at aggregate banks search trends. So peak month for bank searches are found to be October and December, and top search generic banking keywords theme, includes terms around online banking, exchange rate and internet banking. So really for those aggregate advertisers, but also for direct advertisers, those are some of the keywords that you want to really make sure you are covering in your account. 0:45:37.3

That’s a quick nutshell of Banking. I’ll now dive into credit cards, which is the focus sub-vertical. So here is as far as looking at aggregate credit card search trends, so firstly the key seasonal months are found to be November and January and clicks have increase year-on-year by 99% which is quite significant, but average CPC had actually declined by 11% year-on-year. So good growth trends there. You can really see those peaks around those key months, November leading up to the high retail season and January really picking up from the post retail season. So we now look at the device analysis trends for credit cards, so we’re looking at the last twelve months.

The click-through rate has been highest, to growths for tablets, which has increased quite significantly, while desktop also has increased quite a little bit, a bit more gradually and after dropping slightly off in mid last year and then increasing again in, I think, desktops increases quite gradually whereas mobile after dropping a little around July, August, it picked up quite significantly in September to November. So peak period for mobile there. So credit cards, the average CPC across all those devices varies only slightly, with desktop being the highest at $5.23 and mobile the lowest at $4.06. And a couple of key callouts from these slides, mobile searches are on the rise with mobile clicks being the most cost effective for the credit card vertical.

So here’s a comparison, the comparison advertisers compared to direct credit card advertisers. So the graph here compares those two advertisers and an 83% that’s held by the comparison sites for advertisers and a 17% that’s held by direct. This sort of sounds that users interact more with the comparison sites as compared to direct advertiser [admin] sites. The most important is direct advertisers should really include comparison type keywords in their keyword mix; so comparison of credit card rates, and then you could even compare brand name to brand name or product to product.

So this graph looked at an opportunity landscape for credit cards and what it’s really showing is where there’s peak months for click-through rates and at the same time in those months a decline in the CPCs dropping. So these months represent a great opportunity for advertisers to not only take advantage of the higher engagement but also the lowered CPCs, the trend in lower CPCs. The months where this has occurred include April, May and August and really great for advertisers to maximize their engagement whilst really improving their overall ROI.

So looking at the top search generic credit card keywords, so these include ‘Credit Cards,’ ‘Credit Card Comparisons,’ ‘Balance Transfer Credit Cards,’ and ‘Compare Credit Cards’ and so on. The trends around ‘Balance Transfer ‘ and ‘Comparison’ were really found to have the highest CTR, so it’s really important to ensure that you’re not only giving these top keywords, but extending for your short and long tailed sets of keywords around these themes. So this slide again is looking at the audience for credit cards, so consumer graphic insights here.

So users skewed again to the female audience for the credit card vertical across all devices, so their key age demographic being around 35 to 49. So these insights together with the geographic insights create a profile for the credit card vertical. In the top profiles, really looking like women aged 35 to 49, from New South Wales who are heavily users of devices such as mobile and tablets, so that’s your top profile. And then there’s other profiles that shape beneath that. So you’ve really got the opportunity to target that key segment for this vertical and make use of things like demographic and device targeting.

So, just to recap, for the credit card vertical, so this slide covers a recap as well as recommendations, which is great. We’re short on time a little bit, so I’ll cover this all quickly. Keyword recommendations, the advertisements within this vertical really include maximizing your bids in budgets. That’s very important for those seasonal months in order to target particularly for early January and November where those peaks in volume are occurring. Also ensure mobile and tablet targeting is in place, including mobile ad copy, as engagement is highest on this device.

And implement and expand on directional keywords, so it really showed that keyword themes such as ‘Balance Transfer,’ and ‘Comparison’ had really high engagement, so ensuring that you’re not only bidding on these key terms but expanding on this keyword theme. So that’s it for credit cards. We’ll now briefly touch on personal loans and then jump into a few questions. So I’ll hand it up to Greg. He is going to quickly cover off personal loans.

Greg: Thanks Laura. So, first of all, just go through the key months. No surprise sort of towards the end of the year on the lead up to Christmas. You see a spike in volume for personal loans, and this definitely sort of tails off towards January to April. Year on Year, we’re looking at 549% growth as far as clicks with a 10% decrease in CPC. Calling out just a couple of things from the CTR perspective, key months are between February and March, and that’s across all devices. The tablet actually shows the lowest CPCs for that 12-month average at… Sorry, desktop and smartphone show the lowest CPC at $2.41 and $2.42 respectively. . Key call outs – personal loans on mobile searches have dramatically increased year-on-year. Mobile clicks are the most cost effective; an increase in engagement occurs for all devices in the month of March.

Again, here’s the real keywords, so key call outs , with the rise of cash loan providers, pay day loans, etc., whatever you want to call them, has seen an increase to the overall market place. The term ‘Personal Loan’ also drives one in five searches in the overall search category. Key times – May and June hold the greatest opportunity for small loan providers, whilst the customers looking for larger personal loans offered by the bank will then be from October through to the end of December.

So here we’re looking at the overall sort of increased CTR against the CPCs. Again the opportunities exist both January and September where the engagement levels were highest; however, knowing that the volume trends are increasing, please make sure you bid in budget accordingly from September, October, all the way through to the end of January. Here’s just a snapshot with the key age demo being 35 to 49. What we know from an audience profile is that women 35 to 49 come from South Australia and use mobile device to access the internet. The recommendation is that the advertisers focus on the primary target audience in writing specific ad copy depending on their key demographic.

From a state perspective, the credit card click volume per state, its spread out a little bit more or evenly across the states. Here we’re looking at that sort of volume levels . I would definitely recommend, if you’re looking at geographic volume, to reach out to your account manager for more of a detail. And again, same with the recommendations and recap, this is all very high level stuff, we’ve covered most of it. Again remarketing is also coming up; if you’re a small loan provider, there are some editorial restrictions as far as the ad policy guidelines, so please keep that in mind if you’re looking at implementing remarketing or retargeting with your ads.

Otherwise, as per the other sub-verticals, you know, look at ad copy changes, bid optimizations, correctly budgeting according to key volume trends throughout the year, and also that mobile traffic is on the rise and make sure as well that you have a mobile-specific sites so you can capture those conversions from advertisers looking to engage with you from mobile. And that really takes us to the end, so if we have a couple of minutes for questions, we’ll open up the floor and…

Laura: Yeah, so we have a follow-up question already which we’ll cover off first, so please copy questions in now and we’ll cover them up in the next two or three minutes. So the first question really came around demographic targeting and when you should apply this or whether you should apply this to existing campaigns or break out new campaigns? So the options, you can do either , but best practice would be to break out new campaign once you’ve really established what your key demographics are. They could break out the new campaigns for these demographics so you can really manage your setting, targeting, ad messaging, but then really easily run reports and manage budget for these campaigns. So that’s the best practice, and speak to your account manager if you want to know more.

And then, second question we have for now is, how does mobile, playing a role in the Banking verticals? So I think it really can touch on any of those verticals that we’ve covered today and it really comes down to the behavior of the users. So understanding what times of the day or week the engagement is highest from a mobile device, and then just ensuring that you’re covering this behavior with things like device targeting, mobile ad messaging, because obviously the intention behind a mobile search may be a little different to what they’re performing on a desktop or tablet, so making sure you’re really answering this in your ad messaging.

So it not only applies to the Banking vertical but any other vertical, but if you speak to Banking particularly, you want to think about, I mean, if we call out credit cards, it’s probably looking for things like researching or comparing credit cards and trying to think about what the best approach might be. So yeah, really comes back to the intention and behavior behind the search and what messaging you really want to get across in your mobile ad messaging.

So we have another question. So the question is: Can you send me a bulk sheet of keywords suggestions to get started on Bing? So, we definitely can, we can send a bulk list, especially some of the ones we’ve touched in this presentation, but we can share these when we send it around and also we have that list of ….but you’re not sure about this or it’s not really meeting your needs, you can also reach out to your account manager, who can also obtain that list for you. Let us get back to you after the webinar with that and we can definitely supply all the keywords that we’ve touched on and also the extensive lists of keywords.

Greg: Absolutely Laura, those are great recommendations. And also….just also remember to utilize the tools as far as the Bing Ads Intelligence in the ‘Campaign Planner’ tool; we can get some keyword recommendations with bid and budget, those are options there, so…

Laura: Just some last minute housekeeping. We would really like to thank you for joining, and just as a final note, to ensure that we’re making the most of your time and energy, we’d really invite your feedback and we’d love to receive your feedback. So there’s a link that you can click on below the presentation or just wait for us to push the survey to your screen. So you can give us your opinion both from today’s session and you can also make any recommendations for future sessions, and it shouldn’t take you any more than a minute to fill that out.

You’ll also receive a follow-up email before the end of the day with a link to access the webinar, and also share with others, so we please do encourage you to do this, and also follow-up with your account manager if you want to know more. So it will continue to be available on the links for the next three months. So yes, the final thank you. Thanks for joining the webinar. We hope it’s been a valuable use of your time.

Greg: Thank you very much everybody.