A brighter way to send money home, one destination at a time

Following the money home

ServicesGoogle Ads · Apple Search Ads

Teaching the bidding what a customer is

Automated bidding only works when it knows what it’s chasing. We made a completed sign-up in the app the primary goal and demoted the rest, so Google stopped optimizing toward downloads that never became accounts.

One ad group per destination

Then we built a remittance campaign around where the money goes. It started with 25 ad groups in July 2022 and grew to 70, one for every country the card could send money to, each pointing at that country’s own page. Someone searching for how to send money to the Philippines got an ad about the Philippines, and later a page about GCash, the wallet most Filipino families actually use.

We read the search terms every week and cut the ones burning budget: currency converters, exchange rates, people trying to open a PayPal account.

Selling the reasons people choose PYYPL

Once every destination was covered, we scaled by giving each use and each selling point its own campaign.

• What the card pays for: Netflix and other subscriptions, deliveries, phone bills, digital wallets
• Who it’s for: “no minimum salary” and “no Emirates ID required” campaigns, for people a bank turns away
• Who else they’re comparing: competitor campaigns against neobanks and exchange houses, with budget moved there from brand terms PYYPL already won organically

Promotions like free remittances to India, Indonesia and Nepal ran on automated rules that switched the promo ads off and the evergreen ads back on the day the offer ended.

Russian speakers and new markets

A good share of prospects searched in Russian, so we built campaigns with Russian keywords and Russian ad copy for them. Over 2023 we added Kenya, Algeria and markets across North Africa, and paused the ones that ran above the target cost per account.

Apple Search Ads

On Apple Search Ads we audited the campaigns already running and cut what wasn’t paying its way. Then we built search campaigns on the terms people use to look for a virtual debit card, and competitor campaigns on the names of rival apps.

Keeping score when the sale happens in an app

ServicesConversion tracking · GA4 · Looker Studio

Every account started in the app, through Branch, and each new release of the app could quietly break the events Google relied on. We watched the conversion data daily, flagged gaps the moment they appeared and re-imported the identity-check event from Firebase when a relaunch dropped it.

As the business matured we moved the primary goal deeper into the funnel, from accepting the terms to passing the KYC check (know your customer, the identity verification every regulated payment app requires), so the campaigns optimized toward users who could actually use the card.

Weekly and monthly Looker Studio dashboards split performance by country and by user quality, and when Universal Analytics shut down in 2023 we mapped out the GA4 setup for both the website and the app.