QNST
#Sure.
I'll try to stay clear of anything that might be more competitively sensitive and try to answer more generally, if that's okay.
We do think that ---+ there are two things going on in some of these bigger financial services verticals.
One is, there is more spending by clients.
And so there is certainly growth in the spend, or the allocation of spend, more accurately, to the Internet.
I think because we and others continue to improve the performance of the Internet for those clients.
I think we have also been growing faster than that.
And so I think we have been gaining share.
I believe what's enabled that has been the things that are enabling growth generally in other areas, including a broadening of our product set.
Recall, we've dramatically expanded our footprint in financial services from a business that was driven primarily by clicks just a couple years ago.
To now a business in which we sell clicks, leads, and in some verticals, multiple forms of leads, not just multiple quality tiers of leads, as well as calls and in some cases applications or actual sign-ups of customers.
So the broadening of that product set, combined with the broadening of our media footprint.
And recall, we've added, over the past couple years, from business again from a business that was predominantly a couple years ago in financial services, third-party website or publisher driven, to a business where that's a component of it.
But we also have now a much larger business with major media partnerships, with paid media on our own account in various forms in various places, as well as mobile and social, which are now 36% of total revenue.
Up from, gosh, probably high single digits a couple years ago.
So when you combine the effects of those two dimensions of broadening out the footprint in those verticals, what it adds up to is a lot more revenue-generating power related to the ability to track and serve more types of budgets.
But also the ability to better monetize existing media because you can pull it out in so many different forms, or activate it in so many different forms for the clients.
So I think those two things, combined with a little bit of tailwind from certainly some of the client spend pushing to the Internet for various reasons in the various verticals, which we think we will be able to now accelerate or magnify with the rollout of QMP in the coming quarter or so, gives us a lot of confidence.
And by the way, we're still pretty small in these massive markets.
If you look at credit cards, where we have now a good scale business but still really small relative to certainly some of our competitors and certainly the market or mortgage, where I think we are in the top few.
But still very small relative to the opportunity we see in that market and relative to what we can do as we roll out the full product plan.
And then there are some new verticals, like personal loans, where we're really early but extraordinarily excited, given the client base that we have and the products that we're rolling ---+ the same products ---+ into that new business too over the next couple of quarters.
And we feel very good about financial services.
And we think that the insurance results are certainly indicators of that.
But again, we grew overall financial services 57% in the quarter; insurance we grew 63%.
And as <UNK> pointed out, mortgage and credit cards, our second and third largest financial services verticals, grew 32% and 270%, respectively.
So you're already seen a lot of good momentum there, as you indicate, I think for the reasons I talked about.
But we see a heck of a lot more runway in both of those, but also in a few others in the financial services industry broadly defined.
Thank you, <UNK>.
Sure, and you're probably talking about the fact they moved more paid up to the top and added local, which has pushed a lot of the organic results down.
And others, that's right.
We don't have that much of an exposure to our owned and operated SEO anymore.
As you know, it's a relatively small part of our business.
Therefore, we have not seen a material effect of that on our results.
There have been some effects; but it's been up and down and net pretty immaterial, in terms of the changes on our owned and operated.
The dominant portion of our owned and operated SEO exposure now is in our B2B technology group.
And those sites tend to not be affected very much by changes to Google algorithm or to page layouts anyway.
Because they are driven predominantly and primarily by returning visitors, who are coming to these sites frequently to check for updated content and latest news and latest information on technology changes.
Other than sites in our, say financial services and education verticals, which are more transactional and tend to be driven almost exclusively by one-time visitors come through SEO or through Google.
But even in that second group, what I said is ---+ so in the first group, the technology sites, we've seen very little, if any, effects.
And the second group, we've seen more effects; but again, it's not that big a part of our business.
And the effects have been relatively immaterial.
As far as the effects on competitors, I do know that some of those folks are much, much more heavily reliant on SEO results than we are.
And I have only heard the same things you have heard in terms of the effects of layout and other changes in SEO.
And I expect that, and that makes sense to me based what we've seen.
And as I think you know, we have taken a little bit different direction.
And our view is that sites that tend to be more transactional and SEO-driven on a transactional basis, we tend to now shy away from.
Because it's been proven over the past few years that's just not reliable traffic because you don't directly control it.
And it's subject to changes.
And what we're seeing is more frequent changes on shorter and shorter cycles by the folks that actually do control the traffic, most dominantly Google, who has their own objectives in mind as far as what they want to create for their visitors and in their business.
And so we have gone really a different path, which is to make sure we're focused on the best technologies for delivering the best results for clients out of media, wherever comes from.
And making sure we're applying that quite broadly to the media sources on the Internet.
So we're pretty indifferent to who wins the SEO wars because whoever who that is, its likely, if they're in one of our verticals, to want to work with us so they can make the most money out of their traffic in performance marketing.
So we pivoted, as you know, away from a strategy that had a much more SEO in it a number of years ago because it worked great.
But once that ecosystem changed dramatically and got what I would consider to be destabilized ---+ and it's kind of destabilized on an ongoing basis.
It wasn't a one-time event; its a constant challenge.
We really turned our attention and our strategy elsewhere, and its working quite well for us.
Again, as <UNK> pointed out, if not for for-profit education, which we all know is a very, very challenged vertical, our overall business grew 30% year over year last quarter.
And that's really driven by the new products and new product strategy and the broadening of the footprint that I just talked about.
You bet.
