Building a Data-Led Immigration Index for Remitly
Turning search behaviour into a global data asset for prospective migrants.
Remitly, an online remittance service, had no visibility for the high-intent immigration searches its audience makes before they ever consider a money transfer provider. With 281 million international migrants worldwide, the audience was significant, but no single resource existed to help them compare countries through a financial lens. We decided to build one – a proprietary dataset ranking 82 countries against the financial and quality-of-life factors that matter most when relocating, designed to earn Remitly authority in a highly regulated category.
What we did
Legal & Compliance Review
Data Analysis
Search Optimisation
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Pieces of coverage
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Backlinks earned
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Organic clicks
The challenge
Building that resource meant earning trust in a category where trust is hard-won. Finance editors apply a higher standard of scrutiny than general press, and any weakness in sourcing, weighting or methodology risked killing coverage before it started. The index also needed to stand out in an already saturated market for index-led PR, while meeting the compliance bar of a regulated financial services brand, meaning the full methodology had to clear legal review at both global and local level before a single figure could be published.
Our approach
Rather than segmenting by demographics, the strategy was built around real search behaviour – data-identified questions like “where to immigrate” and “best country for financial prospects,” asked by financially active migrants before a money transfer provider enters the picture. Those signals were mapped to 13 categories, from earning potential to access to banking, and used to build the Immigration Index: a scoring model covering 82 countries across 24 metrics, drawn from sources including the World Bank, OECD, Yale and Columbia Universities. Every metric was chosen for its direct link to the financial reality of relocating, and the full methodology went through legal review at global and local level before publication which was slower, but essential for credibility with finance journalists.
The impact
The index exceeded every target set for it. It earned 237 pieces of coverage, including The Independent, Business Insider Africa and The Economic Times, with an average Domain Rating of 55 and 517 brand mentions. Organic performance followed: 7,978 clicks against a target of 5,000, a page one ranking for “best country to immigrate to” in a SERP dominated by governments and global publishers, and a feature in Google’s AI Overview. Non-brand visibility rose sharply in Remitly’s core remittance corridors, with clicks up 146% in the US and 124% in Norway, placing the brand in front of high-intent users at the exact moment they were weighing relocation and money transfer decisions.
"Propellernet produced an industry-leading immigration report that landed authoritative coverage and backlinks, building brand and topical authority."
