Client Stories
Bankrate.com
Rafael Zorrilla,
Director, Interactive Marketing
Q: Describe Your Business.
A: Bankrate, Inc. is the Web's leading aggregator of financial rate information. Bankrate.com, provides rate information to consumers on more than 300 financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, automobile loans, money market accounts, CDs, and home equity loans. Users visit our site, leverage what's best on the Web and they conduct research, educate themselves using our online research tools. But ultimately to connect themselves with lenders and financial institutions.
Q: Describe the situation before working with Efficient Frontier.
A: Prior to working with Efficient Frontier over a year ago, we managed our paid search marketing campaigns in-house. It was a manual process involving countless spreadsheets and long hours of manual calculations just to get a simple ROI analysis - at best, heavy lifting. At Bankrate we tie everything to revenue. We started to experience a challenge with our program when we began to grow the number of keywords and started promoting our new financial products.
Q: What influenced your decision to work with Efficient Frontier?
A: Well the online marketing team here had prior history working with rules-based management systems and we experienced the limitations or the challenges firsthand. We knew that this approach wasn't going to be able to meet a lot of our needs at Bankrate.
We contacted a number of search marketing firms and we looked at their technology and their service offerings. At Bankrate we selected Efficient Frontier because we were impressed with their analytical approach to keywords. We saw the value in predictive modeling and the portfolio concept and its ability to understand what was happening on a keyword level. We were also able to look into bringing scalability to our program and Efficient Frontier was able to meet that need.
Q: What benefits have you experienced since starting with Efficient Frontier?
A: What we've gained is scalability, while keeping a strong ROI - it's a tough thing. We essentially turned coal into fire - by generating activity from the long tail of keywords and generating conversions - new conversions - from typically inactive keywords.
Our relationship with Efficient Frontier has allowed us to meet unique business objectives across our verticals, which have their own sets of keyword behaviors and needs. We've been able to grow our budgets for each of these businesses in a single portfolio, while increasing performance overall.
Importantly, Efficient Frontier has enabled automation; therefore, we don't have to touch our campaigns on a daily basis. We are able to gain a higher level view of what's going on in the overall search landscape - free up our time to look at the competitive intelligence rather then get stuck in the tedious, day-to-day bid management process.
