PartnerCentric Publisher Press - Ad Practitioners LLC
In this series, our goal is to highlight unique publisher partnerships and what differentiates them in the space. The first partner we are featuring is Money.com and ConsumersAdvocate.org. Below is the full interview:
1. Tell us in a few sentences about Money.com and ConsumersAdvocate.org?
Ad Practitioners LLC is our registered company name. Founded in 2016, Ad Practitioners matches world-class brands with engaged audiences across over 165 categories, from personal finance, health, home, and lifestyle to insurance, software and beyond. We own a portfolio of digital brands, including ConsumersAdvocate.org and Money.com. Our properties receive over 45M+ unique visits per year.
ConsumersAdvocate.org is the trusted source that guides 3.5M consumers each month through all of life’s most important buying decisions. From new refrigerators to credit cards (and everything in between), we inform and empower consumers with objective company reviews and recommendations.
Money.com is a digital source of personal stories, candid conversations, and useful information about money and the way it affects our lives. With a nearly 50-year legacy of providing trustworthy advice on every aspect of personal finance, MONEY helps its 8.5M monthly readers lead a richer life—in every sense of the word. Signature franchises include a bevy of Best-In categories such as Best Colleges, Best in Travel, Best Banks, Best Credit Cards, and Best Places to Live, with an aim to capitalize on your finances and promote your well-being.
2. In your opinion, how has COVID-19 affected the performance marketing industry?
All businesses and industries have been affected in one way or another by COVID-19. Our organization works across 160 different industries so we have had a unique opportunity to witness the effects, both positive and negative. It probably is not much of a surprise that we saw businesses relying on storefront sales suffering the most, while businesses whose transactions could be finalized online were far less negatively impacted. In some cases, the latter even saw volume increase due to the surge in online shopping. Industries that we have seen benefit the most during this time have been insurance, mortgage, lending, software, credit and home services. Conversely, we have witnessed a negative impact to store front, retail, auto, credit cards, restaurant and travel businesses.
3. What do you think the industry (and Money.com specifically) will look like in a post-COVID world?
We predict that industries still relying on consumer foot traffic may not survive the economic aftermath as well as businesses that are not able to adjust their model to the service behavioral changes consumers will adopt post COVID. However, organizations that do survive and who adapt their offering to a fully digital experience and checkout process will succeed greatly.
4. What makes you stand out from your competitors? What do you do differently?
Our founder and CEO, Greg Powel spent the first 9+ years of his career at Google working in the AdWords department. During his tenure at Google, he was able to gain valuable insights into the role that third party review and editorial sites play in the Google auction. We have leveraged Greg’s expertise to shape our digital experiences and garner higher CTRs and CvRs compared to the efforts of our competitors and our advertising partners themselves. We candidly share all of our data with our advertising partners so they can measure the relative incrementality we provide. This opens up budgets for scale. In a nutshell, we are highly effective at helping consumers research and connect with the brands and services that matter most to them and provide more shelf space and exposure to brands that are objectively the best in their category all while keeping their net cost to acquire flat or below-the-market rate.
What makes us different:
Media Team: We share data with your partners and prove the incrementality of our campaigns.
Scale: 8M+ monthly visitors, and over 1,500 advertising partners across more than 160 verticals.
Value: Review sites get cheaper traffic on Google and help increase conversion rate.
Flexibility: We offer to work on a performance basis with no minimum budget requirement.
Transparency: We provide keyword data to our partners and work together to provide the greatest value and meet our partners’ goals.
Relationships: We believe in building long-term relationships that go beyond one-time projects and provide value on a consistent, on-going basis.
5. Paid search plays a huge role in your business. What advice would you give to internal search teams when partnering with ConsumersAdvocate.org /Money.com?
It is a common misconception that collaborating with a third party site like ours in non-branded paid search will drive up costs and cannibalize traffic. When we work with advertisers in paid search, it is important to prove our incrementality quickly. This can be achieved by setting up keyword data passing through the UTM parameters so our partners can receive real-time keyword data such as the [keyword], [device] and [geo]. The advertiser can then compare the data we send to their own internal media buying efforts to determine whether our yield of the same keywords and same spend is greater or lower. The results usually show that we have around a 2-3x higher yield when compared to our advertising partners’ media buying efforts.
6. What qualities does your ideal advertiser have?
Advertisers that make the below statements are typically a great fit for our program:
“Our best customers come from Google.”
“Non-branded search terms are expensive.”
“We’re willing to spend as much as we can, as long as it’s profitable.”
“Our preferred channels for driving revenue are clicks, leads and calls.”
“We don’t care about the costs as long as it backs out.”
Qualities:
- Objectively “Best in Class” product or service.
- Understands the value of non-branded paid search
- Products and services that require intensive research or consideration prior to purchasing.
- Subscription-based or recurring payment products or services
- Primary industries: insurance, finance, home services, software and high-end consumer goods or services.
7. Are there any verticals that you don't support?
We do not typically support retail products that are a one-time purchase. However, we are open to exploring any opportunity for collaboration!
8. We're all about the silver linings here. What is one good lesson you've taken away from the past few months?
When advertising partners struggled due to macroeconomic factors from COVID-19, we were able to keep campaigns running with almost every advertiser by continuing to align incentives, right-pricing traffic down where needed, and offer more flexibility around pricing and payment models in order to accommodate each partner’s unique needs. As a result, our partnerships have been strengthened as we navigate these unprecedented times.
Want to learn more about this publisher partner? Reach out to Tracie.Gross@partnercentric.com.
