Canadian Fintech Affiliate: Webpals exits Canada 💔
Life insurance lead gen is heating up, Greedyrates & YoungandThrifty are no more and grab a cocktail at these 3 affiliate conferences🍸
Morning!
Welcome to the Canadian Fintech Affiliate newsletter, a monthly roundup of industry news, offers & traffic channel updates and conferences worth attending for Canadian affiliate marketers.
I’m Cam. You’ve probably come across my LinkedIn posts about digital marketing or bumped into me at a conference. I’ve been in affiliate marketing for 10+ years working in all niches from sweeps to stock trading, pin submits to loans. I’m currently the Director of Performance for Canada at Finder.
I hope you enjoy it! Let me know if you do (or don’t)!
Opinions expressed are my own*
Today’s reading time is 7 minutes.
📈 What’s trending
Gearing up for NYNM, this year should be bigger than ever with the cost of living crisis putting cash-strapped Canadians on the brink. I expect that as soon as the NYE hangover wears off, re-evaluating their finances will be a top priority.
This time of year, balance transfer credit cards, no-fee bank accounts as well as accounts with a large bonus and investing platforms see a pop (RRSP deadline Feb 29, 2024.)
🤑 Traffic from financial comparison sites like Finder.com drive the highest intent traffic for these products. Reach out to me if you’re looking to get in front of our audience.
Holiday spending is upon us. First comes Black Friday then Boxing day, we’re in the depths of it, folks. With Shopify reporting a banner year of Black Friday sales, many expect that that trend will continue.
🚀 Industry updates
XL Media Group (Webpals) is exiting the personal finance niche in Canada as it sells greedyrates.ca and youngandthrifty.ca assets to Wise Publishing.
Driving the news: In the most significant Canadian affiliate news this quarter, Greedyrates and Young and Thrifty, once darlings in the Canadian comparison space now redirect to money(.)ca after being 301’d in October.
Acquired by XL in 2017 for US$9.3 million (12.5 million CAD), Greedyrates was once a top publisher in the Canadian credit card vertical.
Reports suggest Wise acquired the sites for $500k - $1 million CAD. Assuming a 3x annual revenue valuation that puts GR AR around $170k - $330k. A steep drop from what I assume was likely over $4 million/year in 2017.
Why it’s happening: The credit card vertical is hyper-competitive. For an organic site to maintain and grow revenue in this channel they’d need a dedicated SEO and paid team to manage content and traffic. At some point they likely lost traction/rankings in the SERPs and didn’t recover then shifted resources to other sites they own. With XL’s core assets in gambling/gaming, they’re likely unloading underperforming assets that are outside of their core focus of gaming.
Positive signs for the industry as Wise Publishing is investing heavily in growing in a Canadian comparison market that’s becoming more and more competitive.
Companies to watch: Since 2018, major players have entered CA, including Finder🚀, Nerdwallet, Hellosafe, Hardbacon, Finty and Clearscore among others.
What’s next: Expect brands to pay attention and allocate more money to these channel partners. Especially Finder 😎
🥦Parkdale Food Bank needs your support
Food insecurity is on the rise as more and more Canadians rely on food banks to feed their families. Parkdale Community Food Bank has seen this firsthand with an increase of 50% in individuals served since July 2023.
The amount of food they distribute has also increased dramatically from 6-9 tonnes per week in July to 20 tonnes per week in November.
If you’re looking to volunteer or make a donation this holiday season, please consider Parkdale Community Food Bank. For more info visit their website.
🚀 Industry updates
Life insurance is hot in Canada🔥
Driving the news: There has been a fury of new, direct life insurance affiliate programs launched over the past 12-24 months including Emma (Impact), Nowly (Direct), Northcover Life (Kinessa/Matterkind) and Nielson Life (direct).
Why it’s happening: Insurance is a good racket. A lucrative niche with sticky recurring revenue that is still going through a digital transformation in Canada. The niche has been dominated by RATESDOTCA (formerly Kanetix) over the past ~10 years, with Ratehub hot on its heels. Both companies have strong organic traffic through their comparison sites and have vertically integrated brokerages into their comparison platforms. These have allowed them to increase margins as they close policies with their internal teams instead of partnering with advertisers for a commission.This led both companies to be acquired for (my guess) between $200-$400 million CAD in recent years. The former by OTPP and the latter by Novacap.
Companies to watch: PolicyMe (PM) and PolicyAdvisor (PA) have been carving out their piece of the life ins pie although with different models. PM originally started as a broker, and became a direct insurer to own the entire customer journey.
PA has focused on the broker model where they compare products through their engine and recommend the best policy based on a customer’s answers. The user is then presented with different options and prices where they can purchase and bind online.
Sunlife Financial appears to be putting its own program together as they’re actively hiring a team. They previously had an offer live on Fintel. Expect so see them relauch their program in the future.
What’s next: With all these brokers and direct insurers opening up the channel, there will be growth in the aggregator segment. This is a leadgen flow that collects basic info that then will be sent to these brokers or online insurance flows.
ConsumerGenius has launched one and I expect to see more on the networks - Maxbounty, Clickdealer etc. It’s a common model in the US and other markets as media buyers can buy cheap traffic (through affiliates or internal media buys) to the lead flow, then filter intent and quality through the flow before redirecting a user to a brokerage or insurer.
Those with E2E tracking will rise to the top - I’ll dive into this in next month’s newsletter.
🤝 Conferences
Plenty of good shows this time of year. If you’re heading to one, make sure to get on the guest list for some of the parties. You won’t want to miss them 🍸
Affiliate Summit West ASW- January 15 -17, 2024, Caesars Forum Las Vegas
Huge conference that attracts companies in all verticals from around the world. One of the original affiliate conferences.
Affiliate World Asia AWA - Bangkok, Thailand - December 7-8, 2023
If ASW is your boomer parents, AWA is your cool millennial brother. More focused on ecom, funnels and new traffic channels. This is a conference that attracts the top media buyers in the world.
Leadgen World - Hollywood, Florida - January 7-9, 2024
No surprises on the target audience of this conference. If you’re in leadgen, this is a good one to explore.
💡If you’re a Canadian heading to any of these, avoid Rogers and Bell roaming fees by using an eSIM from Airalo.
🤑 Offer updates
National Bank hitting pause on their partnership with Fintel. All credit card and bank account offers will be paused on Jan 1, 2024.
Neo Financial launches HISA. With the big banks in their sights, Neo has launched a 4.00% always-on savings account that is available directly through their in-house affiliate team or through Fintel Connect.
Questrade on the move. Moved from post affiliate pro to Impact Radius early last month. Their internal team still manages the program and the payouts are the same, but tracking is now better if you need a postback placed (and you should always have a postback placed.)
Nesto mortgages pauses on Fintel. With housing sales at their lowest point in a decade, it’s no surprise the mortgage vertical is hurting.
In Nerdwallet’s Q1 results, they cite that their US lending revenue was down 36% primarily due to a decrease in mortgage revenue. They reference this again in their Q2 and Q3 reports.
Nesto’s series B was led by the founders of Assurance IQ (yes, the 2.3 billion exit to Prudential Assurance IQ) so I’m sure they’re providing sound advice on user acquisition strategy. They also have a strategic partnership with Wealthsimple in the works which could see the all-in-one investing platform whitelable their mortgage solution.
My read on this is that they’re scaling through internal media buys and managing their biggest affiliate partners directly.
HSBC paused credit cards and bank accounts on Rakuten on November 7th. The network lost 2 major financial partners in Q4 this year - the other being Scotiabank. With the acquisition by RBC moving forward I expect HSBC is entering a transitional phase as the organizations merge.
I expect that they will relaunch but would consolidate with RBC either under Fintel or Rakuten and run by the same affiliate team at the bank.
RBC Direct Investing going live through Fintel.
🏎️ Traffic channel updates
Organic traffic is doing the Mull River Shuffle. Google has been busy rolling out a ton of updates. The core algo update is currently rolling out and expected to be completed…soon?
This is the fourth Google update in the past 4 months, after a core update in October and a helpful content update in September.
TikTok releases a new ad measurement framework by introducing a new Self-Attributing Network (SAN) integration.
Essentially, they’re providing a suite of new insights in their ads manager for you to understand which ads are performing best and why.
TikTok also released its 2024 Trend Report📈
X clicks are at a discount. With the reported mass exodus of advertisers from the platform this could be a good time to test the channel’s performance, especially heading into the most expensive time of the media buying calendar.
Pinterest drops its trend report for 2024 for all you fashion and DIY addicts.
Reddit meme marketers rejoice, here’s what worked for the front page of the internet in 2023.
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That’s a wrap for my second newsletter. Have a great week!
-Cameron