You may think pay-per-click (PPC) is just another term in a long list of marketing jargon.

Nope. It’s so much more than that. 

With an ROI of $2 for every $1 spent, how could it be “just jargon?”

The reality is that PPC can be a highly effective marketing channel for helping financial services brands get their message out in the market and grow their audience. However, it requires a seasoned pro and practiced touch to get it right. 

But don’t let that deter you from including it in a well-rounded digital marketing strategy. PPC for financial services is an important channel to raise brand awareness, drive new leads, and convert customers. 

In this article, we’ll review everything you need to know about PPC for financial services, including a go-to guide to setting up an effective PPC campaign, incorporating PPC into a cross-channel marketing strategy, and optimizing your PPC campaigns for maximum ROI. 

But before we dive in, let’s start with a question.

What’s the first thing you do when you’re on the hunt for a solution to a problem?

I’m willing to bet you search online. 

PPC for Financial Services 101

Pay-per-click (or PPC) is a form of search engine marketing (SEM) in which brands pay each time an advertisement is clicked. 

A side note here: PPC ads are different from pay-per-impression (PPI) ads, where brands pay each time the ad appears.

Now, PPC advertising can take several forms. 

Most commonly, they appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), on YouTube, across various social media platforms, and through display advertising on websites. Each individual platform is highly nuanced and demands meeting unique criteria. 

But how does it work, exactly?

PPC advertising requires bidding on keywords your ideal audience is actively searching for. This allows brands to place their ads strategically and put the right ad in front of the right people at the right time. 

Effective PPC campaigns are part art, part science. The quality and relevance of the ad, the bid amount, keyword targeting, and other broad campaign factors determine how your ad will rank alongside other bidders’ ads. It’s a tricky equation to get right.

Why Financial Services Should Use PPC

If you’re wondering whether PPC—a potentially expensive and time consuming strategy—is worth it, you’re not alone. 

The financial services landscape is complex and crowded. Getting your product top of mind is a battle. 

As I said in the introduction, I’m willing to bet that the first thing you do when you’re looking for a solution to a problem is search online.  

Your potential customers are likely to do the same. Whether they turn to Google, Bing, or another major search engine, appearing at the top of SERPs is the golden ticket to brand awareness. 

PPC helps you get there by bidding for top results, boosting visibility and relevance to piggyback off your audience’s search intent. 

And if you’re not at the top, your competitors probably are. 

Other than beating out your competitors for attention, PPC offers several benefits for financial services and fintech brands. With PPC you can:

• Place highly targeted messaging in front of specific audience segments.
• Achieve increased visibility in search results for strategic keywords.
• Deploy advertisements more rapidly than other marketing mediums. 
• Gain immediate insights, real-time feedback, and data to inform future iterations.
• Position products and services strategically to gain market share.

While the juice is certainly worth the squeeze, financial services brands face unique challenges when deploying PPC for the first time.

Considerations for Financial Services PPC Campaigns

PPC is a different beast for financial services brands. 

Financial services is a highly regulated industry. It can be difficult to consider industry regulations in the context of strict PPC requirements. 

Google’s financial services policy applies to any company that manages or invests money or cryptocurrency, including financial advice. Financial services advertisers must comply with these terms if they want Google to show ads to users. 

Some key points to this policy include:

• Advertisements must comply with country and state-specific regulations.
• All financial services companies must be transparent about fees, costs, and physical location.
• All ads need to include relevant disclosures.
• Financial services advertisers must undergo a certification process to confirm business practice legitimacy. 

Google wants to protect its users from untrustworthy companies. Due to their potentially harmful nature, certain financial services offers—like high-APR personal loans—are prohibited from advertising on Google altogether. 

Other products—like complex speculative financial products and debt services—must meet even more specific, stringent criteria. 

Google won’t run your ad if you don’t check every box in their policy. Before you pour blood, sweat, and tears into creating a PPC campaign, the policy is worth a read-through. 

Setting up an Effective PPC Campaign

PPC for financial services is complex. Launching and running successful PPC campaigns means following a proven, methodical approach that puts your business goals front and center. Give this 7-step process a try for your next PPC campaign. 

Step 1: Define Objectives and Goals

Too often, financial services companies jump into the PPC game when they want short-term wins. 

But that’s a recipe for disaster. 

Intermittent PPC spending will never be as successful as a thorough, consistent, long-term approach rooted in data analysis, ad iteration, and optimization. 

So before you jump into PPC looking for quick wins, consider your long-term goals and business objectives. 

Step 2: Conduct Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis

The heart of a steadily beating PPC campaign is thorough keyword research and analysis. 

Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Semrush provide clear snapshots of your keywords in terms of search volume, average cost per click (CPC), and keyword difficulty (KD)—letting you make confident decisions about which keywords to bid on.

There are four types of keywords you should be aware of when launching a PPC campaign: 

• Broad match keywords account for misspellings and other broad, relevant terms and variations of your target keyword.
• Phrase match keywords appear as part of a phrase or as a close variation of your original keyword phrase.
• Exact match keywords are as specific as they get. This type of keyword will appear in searches for the exact keyword or a plural version of your identified keyword.
• Negative keywords are words or phrases you never want your ads to display under.

Of course, you may also want to evaluate your competitors’ PPC strategy. See if they rank for any of your target keywords and analyze how they’re getting results. This step is crucial to standing apart, differentiating your PPC ads, and getting results. 

Step 3: Allocate Budget and Set Bidding Strategies

Determining your bidding strategy is like walking a tightrope. Set your CPC too high, and you risk busting your budget. Set it too low, and you risk your ads being overshadowed by higher bidders.

Optimal spending is different for everyone. But managing your bidding follows some tried and true strategies:

• Cap your budget: setting a cap on the advertising platform ensures you will not overspend.
• Pick a target KPI: pick one KPI and set a target. This is called Smart Bidding and helps advertisers optimize ad spend around the metrics that matter most. 
• Be mindful of bidding adjustments: as you gain real-time feedback on how your ads are performing, bid adjustments let you lean into what’s working. 

Whether you bid manually or automatically, don’t set it and forget it. Keep a close eye on results and pivot quickly to optimize ROI.  

Step 4: Craft Compelling Creative

Your ad copy is everything in PPC. Since the ad itself lacks visual elements, users will rely on your word to decide whether clicking through to your landing page is worth it. 

Engaging headlines, persuasive ad descriptions, emotional language, and establishing a clear link to users’ pain points will help you ad copy stand out.

You may also want to consider ad extensions, which provide additional information relevant to your advertisement and your target audience. Ad extensions can take the form of contact information, sitelinks, and ratings to encourage the user to click through.

Step 5: Create a Campaign Landing Page

One of the biggest mistakes advertisers can make is diverting all their ad traffic to their homepage. Each ad campaign should have a dedicated landing page with language that matches the voice and tone of the ads. 

Put yourself in the users’ shoes. When they click on a PPC ad link, they expect more information relevant to the ad they just clicked. Your landing page should deliver on that expectation—give them what they need to know, what the value of that information is, and how they can take action.

Design your landing page to be mobile responsive. Calls-to-action should be clear. and prepare to analyze the performance of the ads versus the performance of the landing page. 

Step 6: Measure Performance

Tracking PPC Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is just as important as the setup of the campaign launch. Here are a few metrics to keep an eye on: 

• Click-through rate (CTR), or the percentage of people seeing your ads who click through to them, calculated by dividing total clicks by ad impressions.
• Cost per click (CPC), or the amount that you will pay for each click your advertisement generates.
• Conversion rate (CVR), or how many ad clicks resulted in an action you want from users.
• Cost per conversion (CPA), or how much it costs to acquire a lead with an ad campaign.
• Cost per mille (CPM), or cost per every thousand impressions—this is usually related to PPI.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS), or how much return on investment the new conversion generates relative to the ad spend.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC), or the amount of money spent to earn a new customer.

The most meaningful insights will come from measuring your own performance over time. But it can also be helpful to look at PPC performance benchmarks relative to the rest of your industry.

Above all, you should take into account whether your ads are driving the right leads and potential customers.

Step 7: Try Advanced PPC Strategies

Accelerate your understanding of what works and what doesn’t by setting up A/B tests (or split tests). This process lets you test two versions of the same ad by picking one element and measuring how it performs against the control. 

You can test:

• Headlines.
• Ad copy.
• CTAs.
• Landing page copy and design.
• Keywords.
• Display formats.
• Timing.

When measuring PPC results, it’s critical to have conversion tracking set up properly. Consider the source, the specific ad campaign, ad group, and keyword that brought the lead to you. This makes finding the winning creative and keyword combos as apparent as day when you go back to analyze your success. 

Additionally, remarketing (or retargeting) gets you in front of previous customers or leads. After all, they are already familiar with your brand; you just need to overcome their objections with your ad creative. 

Measuring PPC performance may be the last step in running an effective PPC campaign—but it’s the first step in optimizing your campaign ROI.

Optimize Your PPC ROI With CSTMR

PPC for financial services is like a game of whack-a-mole. You probably won’t hit it perfectly square on the head on the first try, but you just have to keep going. 

Optimizing PPC ROI takes time, dedication, and commitment to the process.

It’s also a vital ingredient in your holistic marketing strategy. It complements your content marketing efforts (including SEO, social media advertising, and email marketing) to attract, nurture, and convert more leads.

PPC success is largely dependent on your ability to stay in the weeds, keeping a short leash on your budget, and constantly analyzing results. But if navigating the alphabet soup of CAC, CPA, ROAS, and CPC feels overwhelming, we’ve got you covered. 

At CSTMR, we work with you every step of the way—helping you define your goals, segment your audience, identify effective advertising platforms, develop creative copy and design, monitor results, and optimize your ads—to deliver the most impactful digital advertising approach possible. 

We help you find the sweet spot where messaging, creative, data, and market opportunity meet to give you the biggest PPC bang for your buck—seamlessly integrated into your overall marketing strategy.

Gain the confidence of working with a team that understands the nuances of supporting financial services brands through PPC campaigns. Learn more about CSTMR’s digital advertising services today.