PPC for Financial Advisors: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in Google Ads for financial advisors is the most effective way to promote their businesses online. That means targeting people who are interested in their services by reaching them with text and image ads.

 

However, Google has recently brought in rules that affect how financial businesses advertise on their search engine. This includes sending documentation to prove their certification and also verifying their business details.

 

Check out the following tips to find out how to manage your PPC campaigns and get the best results. These are proven tactics that help you reach your audiences and achieve good conversion rates.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

 

Setting up conversion tracking is one of the first things to do as you manage your PPC campaigns. This involves tracking calls and enquiries coming direct from your ads and your website. So, this is important to helping you run effective and exceptional campaigns.

 

 

In your Google Ads account you have a number of options to create your conversions. This includes using lead form extensions that visitors can submit their details on in your ads. It also includes setting up call extensions to track calls from your ads. And you can visit the Conversions page as shown in the screenshot above to create your conversions.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

 

As a financial advisor, the average cost per click can be high and your budget can be quickly spent if you get searches that are not relevant. So you should continue to build your negative keyword list to block searches that are not relevant for you.

 

 

By regularly checking your search terms report in your campaign, you’ll be able to see many of the searches that your ads are appearing for. Some you’ll be getting impressions and clicks for and some you’ll only be getting impressions for.

 

So, any that are not relevant you should select and add at the campaign or ad group levels or add to a negative keyword list.

 

3. Check Recommendations

 

The Recommendations page is a helpful section of your account that helps you to improve your campaigns easily. The recommendations you find in there are created by the machine learning system when it finds opportunities to improve your campaigns.

 

 

This helps save you time from having to manage each aspect of your campaigns manually and that can be inefficient. So, you can leverage the power of artificial intelligence in your account to help you achieve your goals.

 

But check the recommendations to make sure they are relevant for your business. And apply any that are and dismiss any that are not, and that will help to increase your Optimisation score.

 

4. Find new keywords

 

One of the recommendations you’ll see in your campaign is to add new keywords. However, this will only appear if there is a possibility that the keywords will improve campaign performance. And even if you do see some keyword suggestions, first check that they are relevant for your business.

 

Also, use the Keyword Planner tool to find more keywords. The research here will give you more insights on new keyword opportunities and how much you’re likely to spend for each of them.

 

And you can use this tool to also scan competitor websites to see if there are keywords that you can add based on the context and what it finds.

 

 

The search terms report mentioned above is also a place to find keywords that you can add. You’ll find searches that you don’t have related keywords for, but they are appearing because of the match types you’re using. Adding them helps to give you greater control over bids and how your ads appear for them.

 

5. Update bid strategy

 

Another recommendation you’re likely to find on the Recommendations page is an option to improve your bidding strategy. So, you may get a recommendation to change to a Smart bidding strategy like Maximise Conversions if you started with another bid strategy type.

 

 

Like the other recommendations, you should review this one carefully too, to make sure it is relevant for your business. Because changing bid strategy is a major change that can affect performance and will put your campaign in learning mode again.

 

6. Do competitor analysis

 

PPC advertising for financial advisors is most effective when you’ve carried out research into your competitors to see what they’re doing in their PPC campaigns. This includes looking at the keywords they are bidding on and how much they pay for each keyword on average.

 

There are a few tools that you can use to carry out this research but one that I recommend from past experience is SERanking. It has a Competitor research tool that shows you how much other financial advisors spend per month on average in their PPC campaigns. And you’ll see which keywords and search queries they appear for.

 

 

7. Consider broad match type keywords

 

After you’ve been running your ads for some time and have been getting decent search volume traffic from your phrase and exact match keywords, you should consider other match types.

 

Broad match type keywords can work well for your business if you’re looking to target searches that you may not have found during your keyword research. And it helps to increase your click volumes and leads to potentially more conversions.

 

But as a financial advisor, you should make sure you don’t get a big increase in searches that are not relevant. And this can happen especially if you add broad match keywords, so you should add more negative keywords.

 

 

Get in Touch

 

I’m a PPC consultant for financial advisors and I help with campaign setup and management and I’m happy to discuss your requirements. Please use the form below to contact me to discuss.