Nettra Media CEO Dave Martin (center) is working with Alpharank to help small financial institutions better track applicants online. Photo contributed

Credit unions and smaller community banks may have an opportunity to compete more fairly with national banks by extending the capabilities of their marketing reach thanks to Fresno-based Nettra Media and Redwood City-based Alpharank’s recent partnership.

For years, national banks have had the ability to track users and applicant’s usage of their websites in relation to marketing campaigns, potentially giving them an advantage over community banks and credit unions.

Nettra, in partnership with banking portal data enrichment platform Alpharank, brings applicant data into the light for local banks and credit unions. According to Nettra Media CEO Dave Martin, the updates could be a game changer for these financial institutions.

“The large-scale national banks across the U.S. have huge budgets from a marketing perspective,” Martin said, adding that their investment of millions of dollars into their marketing programs help to align money spent on digital ads to how well those ads perform. “The majority, well over 90% of smaller banks, community banks and credit unions, do not have this insight.”

For many credit unions, after clicking to apply for loans and accounts, applicants are redirected from their web pages to an online banking portal. This redirection causes many credit unions and small banks to lose the capabilities to track an applicant’s status after leaving the institution’s webpage.

“From a Google analytics standpoint, you can track when somebody clicks on that ad and goes to a site,” Martin explains, “but for many banks and credit unions, after they leave their site to that online banking portal, they lose tracking — they don’t really know what that person does.”

He explained that Alpharank has created software that lives within the banking portal, enabling sites to track information while keeping personally identifiable information (PII) safe and secure.

The development, which was created by Alpharank and improved upon by Nettra, enables the website to track the loan information without the risk of exposing PII.

“Alpharank’s data is able to extract traffic source and how many loans that traffic source was responsible for, but that’s where their data ends,” Martin said. “What we’ve [Nettra] done is we’ve built an interface that would take that data and enrich it with the actual spends of the ad platforms, and by doing that now banks and credit unions can look at the spend-per-traffic source.”

Martin says this will enable smaller banks and credit unions the ability to track their marketing campaigns’ success based on user traffic.

“This has been a game changer for many credit unions and community banks because they spend quite a bit of money on marketing, but not really knowing how well it performs.”

Martin hopes that smaller banks and credit unions will be able to compete more with larger banks and institutions by increasing their ability to reach more customers through data driven advertising.