Google Ads for Financial Advisors: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads advertising is making a big impact for financial advisors. It’s helping them to target people that are actively looking for their services and their conversion rates are high.

And this is better than most other types of advertising that seek to disrupt their prospects.

As a financial advisor, Google Ads will help you target people that need help with investment and savings advice, tax planning, financial planning, retirement or any other financial area you cover.

Google has recently started requiring that advertisers of financial services should be verified to continue to advertise. So, advertisers in the UK should confirm they’re authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

That means before creating an account, make sure you have this in place to prevent any disruptions to your ads.

Follow the instructions below to setup your campaign after you’ve created your account at ads.google.com.

 

Campaign objective

The Marketing Objective feature in your campaign settings is there to help you choose the best objective to promote your financial services. There are many objectives to choose from and you can also setup your campaign without the guidance of a goal or objective.

The best Google Ads objective for financial advisors and businesses is the ‘Leads’ objective. This will help your campaign to focus on getting leads, enquiries and other conversions by customising the features to your requirements.

 

Campaign type

Next, you should select the campaign type that is most relevant for your business. Google Ads campaigns for financial advisors benefit most from the Search campaign type because it uses keywords and ads to target people that are searching on Google.

You should also consider setting up a Display Remarketing campaign to retarget people that have been on your website, to bring them back.

 

Budget

Competition for finance related keywords is high in Google Ads. For financial advisors that means having a larger budget on average than most other industries.

However, you can start with a small budget to test the keywords and then increase it as performance improves.

A recommended budget to start with is $1300 or £1000 in the first month. Then as you improve the targeting of your campaign you can increase it month by month and that will help to increase clicks and customers.

 

Bidding

Google Ads bidding for financial advisors can be a challenge for new advertisers. There are at least six bidding strategies to choose from and it’s not always easy to know which one to start with.

The two types available in your Search campaign are automated and manual bidding strategies. And a good bid strategy to begin with is Maximise Clicks because it is an automated strategy and works to get you as many clicks as possible.

You can test another bid strategy later, like Maximise Conversions with a target cost per acquisition (CPA) when you have more data and know how much you want to pay for each conversion.

 

Keywords

As mentioned above, financial keywords are very competitive and it’s important to pick the right ones and set the right budget. The Keyword Planner tool will help you find the keywords to add in your account.

And you will be able to see how competitive they are and use the forecasting tool to see what click volumes and performance you’re likely to get.

Also, make sure you start with phrase and exact match keywords. Only include broad match keywords later when you have a good negative keyword list and want to now increase clicks and conversions.

This is an example of a keyword in phrase and exact match type formats and you can do the same for all the keywords you find:

“financial advisors” – phrase match keyword
[financial advisors] – exact match keyword

 

Text ads

Google Ads adverts for financial advisors should focus on benefits that lead to good click through rates. That requires knowing your audiences well and using good copywriting skills to reach them.

With Responsive search ads you can do that effectively because you get 15 headlines and four description lines, unlike previous ad types.

And with your ad extensions like sitelinks, callouts and call extensions, you can extend the reach of your ads.

 

Locations

Wherever your customers are, whether local or national, across the country or in specific cities or towns, Google Ads can help you target them precisely. You can also use an advanced option like radius targeting. However this one could end up targeting people that are not relevant because of IP address allocations so you should be careful with it.

Also, update your Location options to target only ‘people in or regularly in your targeted locations’. And this prevents people who are in other locations from seeing your ads.

 

Ad schedule

As a financial advisor, you’ll want to advertise only when you can get the best performance from your ads. This can be on all days or on specific days and hours based on your requirements and the Ad schedule feature will help you with this.

When you’re just starting, it’s a good idea to advertise on all days and hours so you can see the performance for each day and hour. Then you can change later to target only the times for you based on your Time reports.

 

Where your ads appear

Your ads will appear on Google in one of the top or bottom positions. The top positions normally appear above the Organic listings, however these positions can be very competitive for financial searches and you’ll usually pay more for each click.

Your ads are also eligible to show on Search distribution partners that use Google.com as their default search in their browsers and toolbars.

And if you opt into the Display Network too, your ads will be eligible to show on some of the many websites and apps that are part of this network. Just be aware that these will appear for people who are just browsing and not actually searching and only when you have budget left from your Search ads.

 

Get in Touch

As a PPC specialist I help many financial advisors with campaign setup and management services. Contact me below to discuss your requirements and for a proposal and quote.