How the Private Lending Market Can Benefit from the Microsoft and Verizon Media Partnership

How The Private Lending Market Can Benefit from the Microsoft and Verizon Media Partnership

By Ryan Roberts, Sr. Director of Marketing

In January 2019, Microsoft announced their newly formed and strengthened relationship with Verizon Media (formerly known as Oath). It is by-product of Verizon taking a huge $4.6 billion write-down on Yahoo and AOL as they failed to meet expectations.

From March 31, 2019, Yahoo Search traffic will be exclusively served by Bing Ads and this is to include traffic currently acquired from Oath Ad Platforms (previously known as Yahoo Gemini) and other search advertising platforms.

This update means that whereas before you had to access multiple distinct platforms to manage your search and display campaigns, you can now use a single platform for your search campaigns for Bing, Yahoo, and AOL.

But what does this mean for the future of private lending and advertising and what are the best ways for you to take advantage of it?

Yes, a competitive edge with Bing, Oath, and Verizon Currently, the average loan for a private lender doing Non-Owner occupied residential, Multi-Family and Mixed-Use investments costs around $3500 to acquire and close.

This means that you want to be doing as much as possible to streamline and coordinate your customer acquisition efforts so that you’re not spending extra money. The enhanced partnership will make your search campaigns easier to manage while helping you reach a valuable audience across Microsoft and Verizon Media properties and partner networks.

In the world of Google’s dominance of all, the truth is that other sources have been underutilized and under optimized from an advertising perspective in private lending. Yet with a little bit of focus in the right direction, you can ensure that you are doing everything you can to expand your search reach.

The newly presented opportunity here makes it easier to find, purchase and monetize on advertising inventory and impressions across search terms that convert to leads - and closed funding scenarios. It allows advertisers to centralize advertising efforts under a single platform across those networks and measure quality, impressions, and conversions from a single source.

Why Bing and not Google Pay Per Click: Before we go into how this can benefit you, it’s important to clarify the distinctions between Bing and Google and how you can work these to your advantage.

Bing currently has 34% of the desktop search engine market share worldwide, and importantly, you have access to 63 million individuals searching who cannot be accessed with Google Adwords. Even more important, 40% of the Bing demographic is aged 35 to 54 years old - a particularly close match for the average borrower demographic for private lending.

So if you’re not using Bing Ads, that’s a substantial amount of missed opportunity. Almost 40% of the Bing Network ranges from 35 to 54 years old which is a very close match to average borrower demographic within private lending -- especially for surfacing potential SFR investors as customers.

Bing also offers a more reduced cost per click opportunities, ranging from 20-35%. This means that a $20 CPC could cost as little as $13 on the new platform.

Google CPC Insights: White Collar, Tech Savvy, Skews younger < 35 years old, College Degrees, Majority of Search Market, Greater Worldwide Reach, Extremely competitive CPC market, Higher CPC’s

Bing CPC Insights: Blue Collar, Less Tech Savvy, Skews Older 35-55 years old, Average HHI > $100k, Less search volume, Mostly U.S. search traffic, Less competitive, Lower CPC

What To Do With Your Ad Campaigns: Deal flow is key. Surfacing new funding scenarios can be time consuming and it’s never easy. When it comes to building and running your customer acquisition campaigns, Microsoft has been clear about how the new platform is going to roll out.

If you are currently run search campaigns on Oath Ad Platforms your campaigns will keep running until March 31st, and you don’t have to worry about stopping them. Instead, you’ll have til mid-March to replicate your campaigns and campaign budgets on Bing Ads. The official word from Microsoft recommends adding a 10% budget buffer to avoid getting constrained. The process to replicate is pretty easy. There’s plenty of tooling in place to “copy and paste” your existing Google PPC campaigns on this network in a matter of minutes.

Make sure that you then keep your Oath Ad Platforms search campaigns running, while building up your Bing Ads. Keeping these search campaigns running is the best way to avoid the loss of volume during the migration period.

If you run campaigns on Bing Ads only then you might find that you receive additional clicks, mainly from US traffic. This would be a great time to increase your Bing Ads budget so that you don’t miss out on the potential increase in traffic volume. Adding 10-15% budget buffer will allow you to avoid campaign pauses. If you run campaigns targeting other countries, it’s unlikely that you’ll notice any additional volume.

Centralize Your Campaigning & Customer Acquisition: When it comes to efficient and effective campaigning and customer acquisition, you want to make sure you can centralize your strategy. The new Bing platform means that no longer will you have to maintain conversion tracking code for separate advertising platforms. So, you can easily test, scale, and evaluate your results across the different inventory & impression streams.

In fact, this is quite possibly going to be the biggest “hidden treasure” where lower costs conversions are available because fewer industry competitors have invested the same time and money as they have in platforms like Google or Facebook ads.

It will also make re-marketing efforts for lead loss and conversion recovery easier. It opens up a single source for display campaigns and makes it possible to use Bing and Google to maximize potential efficiency between each platform.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ryan Roberts is a Sr. Director of Marketing for a San Diego based joint venture real estate investor and operator. The firm’s principals have a combined 40+ years experience in property development and real estate finance. Parent holding companies portfolio totals 10M+ square feet and is valued in excess of $1.4 billion.

For the last 8 years of his career, he’s worked with the world’s leading companies and venture-backed startups across various qual/quant marketing functions. Prior, he held software engineering roles for large-scale e-commerce ventures.

Ryan’s extensive technical background, rooted in product management, hardware, and software development lends well to a scientific approach in marketing. 1M units shipped, $22M in retail sell-out on products created.

CONTACT: (616) 635-9732 or ryan@e1even.com