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If you believe SimilarWeb statistics then last month people in India visited the Exness website a little over 50m times.
That made the company the fifth-most visited website in the finance category in India for December. It also means Exness had almost 20m more visits from India than the Financial Times did from the entire world.
This fits with a broader pattern that we see in Google trends. As you can see below, searches for ‘Exness’ originating in India have risen steadily over the last five years.
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It’s not just web traffic either.
The Exness Go app currently ranks 79th on Android – ahead of MetaTrader and TradingView – and its Exness Trade app is 73rd on iOS devices.
It’s worth noting that Android controls ~95% of the Indian smartphone market today. Note also that MetaQuotes was removed from Google Play in India last year, although it now appears to be back.
Exness is not the only broker targeting India. By most accounts, the country is now one of the largest markets in the world for this industry, although most of this has to be done – in theory – via reverse solicitation.
If you look at how Exness operates in a lot of markets, it’s basically something like a triple-pronged approach.
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Firstly, they slam Google ads. Then they have loads of IBs. Finally, you have affiliates. That’s obviously not the whole picture but it’s something like that.
You can see a separate example of this from a couple of weeks ago when we looked at the Maghreb and wider North Africa region.
Exness currently has hundreds of active Google ads targeting Egypt. It has a Team Pro member from there, as well as lots of other active IBs. Then if you search for ‘Exness’ in Egyptian Arabic on Google, this is one of the first results…
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One of the differences with India is that you cannot easily advertise your business there. This means you have to play a bit of a different game when marketing.
For example, if you look at how Exness is currently advertising in India using Google, it is only for their affiliate programmes.
Facebook ads are more direct and some link the user to download the Exness app. Others appear to be more for ‘branding’.
However, SimilarWeb data suggests that the overwhelming majority of traffic to the Exness website does not come through Google and Meta’s ad networks. Instead it comes from Adsterra, which is an ad network operator.
The likelihood is that Exness is doing this themselves, rather than having affiliates who are also placing ads using the network.
The other obvious factor is affiliates. India, it should go without saying, is a huge country in population terms.
Consequently, many affiliates there have audience sizes that someone in the UK would struggle to even begin competing with.
For example, one of the company’s popular affiliates has almost 2.5m subscribers on YouTube and is regularly getting 100s of thousands of views per video. Another popular YouTuber has 700k subs and is getting tens of thousands of views per video.
If you spend a few minutes just going through YouTube, you will quickly find lots of similar channels, often with similar sized audiences, that all have affiliate links to Exness and are in some way promoting the broker.
If you look at Google search / SEO affiliates, Exness does not seem to do a huge amount on English search.
However, if you begin looking at local languages, like Hindi or Punjabi, then it starts to crop up a lot more.
For example, if you search ‘best forex broker in India’ in Hindi, then TradersUnion is one of the first results to show in Google. Who do they rank as the best forex broker in India?
The final factor that I found interesting was how Exness also performs reputation management.
Lots of companies do this and I always find it kind of funny. The general goal with this stuff is to game any negative Google searches with your own spam results.
For example, a few years ago Elon Musk starting selling Tesla brand ‘short shorts’ at exactly the same time the company had huge short positions against it. This was a big story and it got lots of media coverage. The result? Anyone Googling ‘Tesla shorts’ would not get any negative stories about Tesla’s financials. Instead the entire first page of Google was stories about the pairs of shorts they were selling.
A more interesting trend you see in our space is using large social media or blogging websites to game Google search. So if you search ‘is Exness legal in India’ or some variation of that, you will get completely random blog posts on sites like LinkedIn, Medium, and Quora. For example, this post is currently ranked no.1 if you Google search that phrase from inside India.
Another common tactic seems to be around withdrawals. Let’s say you have a bunch of people saying bad stuff about your withdrawal processes. You retaliate by getting a bunch of affiliates to post videos withdrawing loads of cash. As we see with prop payout certificates, this is a good way of encouraging users to sign up as well.
The final point I’d note here is that Exness appears to have zero employees in India. This is one of the more remarkable features of the company as a whole. If you look at Thailand, for example, the company is very successful there but also has no local presence.