Why Most Pay-Per-Click Advice Is Wrong For Financial Firms

Managing a small/medium Pay-Per-Click accounts (We will cover Google and Microsoft Ads) for a financial firm requires a tailored approach. Strategies that work for firms like Goldman Sachs or Schroders will often harm smaller firms accounts. These platforms default options and recommendations often favour bigger businesses, making it challenging for small financial firms to achieve the desired results. Here’s a guide to help small financial firms generate more leads with their pay-per-click advertising.

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Network Settings

Best Settings for Google: For Google Ads, it's best to disable search partners and the display network to avoid click fraud and junk leads.

Best Settings for Microsoft: On Microsoft Advertising, the search partners setting you must turn off is referred to as syndicated search partners. However, it's not perfect. You will need to reach out to support to request the exclusion of the audience network entirely from your account. Additionally, analyse your referral sources and exclude any search engines or display websites that are ineffective. This could include news sites or unknown search engines. It makes sense to exclude as many as you can and just stick to Microsoft's core engine, Bing, so update your exclusions frequently. Another good tip is that currently, Microsoft Advertising doesn't allow you to turn off display advertising completely. However, you can reduce the frequency of your multimedia-based ads by adjusting the setting to the minimum (+20%), which will help limit their appearance.

‍Why: These networks are often responsible for click fraud and junk leads, which can drain a small budget quickly. This is due to the variety of unchecked and spammy search engines and fraudulent websites referring ineffective "clicks" to your pages. 

Location Options

Best Setting: Set locational settings within your campaign to Presence only and not Presence and Interest: This covers people in or regularly in your targeted locations.

Why: The default setting shows ads to a broad audience, often outside your target area, wasting ad spend.

Auto-Apply

Best Setting: Disable auto-apply on all recommendations. .

Why: Auto-applied changes can negatively impact performance. Instead, review and apply changes manually after understanding their potential impact.

Negative Keywords

Best Setting: Add negative keywords before launching campaigns, but the real key is to continuously update this list. Keep optimising where clicks are coming from and gradually narrowing the search parameters over the long term.

Why: This helps Google's AI and algorithms understand who to and not to show your ads to, reducing irrelevant and spammy clicks.

Negative Keyword Lists

Best Setting: Use negative keyword lists instead of individual campaign keywords.

Why: Lists can be applied to multiple campaigns, making it easier to manage and update. For example, you might keep a list of negative keywords to stop users searching for "free financial advice" or "financial internships" from seeing your ads. Instead of adding these keywords to every campaign individually, you could add them to one list, which would then apply to all linked campaigns.

Maximise Conversions Bidding Strategy

Best Setting: Use the portfolio version of this strategy.

Why: It allows you to set a maximum cost per click, preventing unexpectedly high charges.

‍Broad Match Keywords

Best Setting: Only use broad-match keywords if:

• You're tracking qualified leads as conversions.
• You're using a conversion-based bidding strategy.
• You're getting regular conversions (e.g., > 30/month).
• You have a solid negative keyword list.

‍Why: Broad-match keywords need robust guardrails and feedback to be effective.‍

Focusing on Specific Services

Best Setting: Focus your limited ad budget on one or two facets of your business.

Why: Concentrating on one area helps you gather data faster and determine what’s working before expanding to other services.

‍Geographical Focus

Best Setting: Focus your budget on one or two tight geographic areas if you serve clients from multiple locations.

Why: Concentrating your ad spend in one area provides clearer data and faster results.

‍Performance Max Campaigns

Best Setting: You must avoid starting with a Performance Max campaign.

Why: These campaigns require a high volume of impressions, clicks, and conversions, which small accounts often don’t generate. Start with search campaigns instead.

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‍Specific Tips from Hatten

We believe robust reporting and analytics are crucial for success. That's why we use a combination of Google services, such as GA4, alongside other softwares such as Swydo and WhatConverts to track our clients analytics and leads. One reason we highly recommend WhatConverts specifically is its excellent feedback loop through a simple but highly effective Google and Microsoft Ads integration.

Instead of merely setting up conversions based on what Google or Microsoft suggest, you can feed real conversions and leads back into your account to enhance targeting. For example, we configure accounts so that when a lead is marked as quotable in WhatConverts (or via Zapier into your CRM), this specific information is fed back into the account. This setup ensures that the account registers a conversion only when you designate it as such.

Think of it this way: the account only receives "food" (a conversion marked as quotable by you) when you provide it. Over the medium to long term, this approach helps train the account to display your search ads where they are most likely to result in valuable conversions.

This strategy works well because Google's primary goal is to generate revenue, but they understand your firm needs a good ROI to continue using their services. Therefore, their algorithms will strive to secure more conversions. By providing super specific, granular and high-quality conversion data, you should see improved results over time.

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For small financial firms, strategic settings and focused management are crucial to maximising leads and minimising costs with your pay-per-click. By adjusting network settings, using targeted location options, managing negative keywords effectively, and focusing on specific services and geographical areas, small financial firms can significantly improve their ad performance. If you need further assistance with your pay-per-click ad strategy, feel free to get in touch with us at Hatten. We're here to help you maximise your advertising budget, and we welcome firms of all sizes from anywhere around the world.