Are you confident in the data that measures your current financial advisor digital marketing strategies? Digital marketing is now more important than traditional marketing for financial advisory firms as well as most other businesses. The best part about digital marketing is it connects financial advisor firms with potential clients who are genuinely interested in financial services. Many of these prospects can be converted into paying clients at an incredibly low acquisition cost.
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However, you won’t have an accurate gauge of whether your digital marketing efforts are paying off as expected unless you analyze key metrics at least monthly. Let’s take a look at what digital marketing metrics are really all about and highlight the most important metrics for financial advisors.
The Basics of Digital Marketing Metrics
Digital marketing metrics are best described as measurable variables that financial advisors use to gauge and track marketing campaign performance over time. Think of these metrics as report cards of sorts that indicate whether your marketing approach is a success, a failure or somewhere in between these two extremes.
An in-depth analysis of key digital marketing metrics provides you with the valuable insight you need to determine if specific aspects of your online marketing strategy need modified, enhanced, or stopped. Make the appropriate alterations, re-analyze your digital marketing metrics thereafter and you will gradually make progress in your quest to create leads and contacts and convert them into revenue producing clients.
Web Traffic
Google Analytics’ “All Traffic” shows the number of people who engage with your financial advisor firm’s website in the aggregate. This metric can be sub-divided into specific mediums/sources that detail where your firm’s online traffic actually came from. This view of your firm’s online traffic provides a top-down view of your website and the success (or failure) of your digital marketing efforts to increase visibility and traffic.
Keep a close eye on your web traffic as time progresses to pinpoint patterns that reveal trends in online traffic across weeks, months and even years. If your digital marketing efforts are effective, your financial advisor firm’s website traffic from all sources will eventually increase.
How to do it: Measuring web traffic is surprisingly easy. Begin by going to the Google Analytics dashboard. Go to the Acquisition report section. Transition to the Overview. Take a look at the table’s column for “Sessions” and you will have the valuable insight you need into your website’s traffic.
Total Conversions
Conversions are essential to your financial advisor firm’s success. In the traditional sense, a conversion occurs when a prospective client transitions into a paying client. Alternatively, in the context of digital marketing, tracking user engagement in the online realm and what those prospects are doing as they move through the sales funnel is also a conversion process (visitors into leads and contacts). When an online visitor completes a specific action that your financial advisor firm wants to see happen, it counts as a conversion.
Examples of such desirable online actions include:
- Call your office
- Filling out an online form
- Downloading information
- Signing up for an email newsletter
- Clicking a button for a download
- Generating an account
In other words, conversions in the context of digital marketing are the number of anonymous online visitors to your website who transition from anonymity to “known records” within your firm’s marketing database.
If you find your website has a low conversion rate, it is an indication that one or several of the following are true. You website:
- Has design issues
- Is not delivering the right information
- Is not competitive with other financial advisor websites
- Is not providing free offers with compelling titles
- Is not reaching the right investors
The accurate tracking of your firm’s online conversions makes it easy to pinpoint the specific pages and offers that online visitors are interacting with on your website and the pages and offers they are ignoring. Furthermore, the tracking of internet conversions measures the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of your website’s user experience design.
If you determine your website’s conversion rate is still lower than expected, you should shift your attention to your online sales funnel. Furthermore, a low conversion rate is a sign that the time may be right to invest in the modernization of your financial advisor firm’s website.
How to do it: Viewing total conversions is easy. All you have to do is head to Conversions, click Goals, click Overview, click Source/Medium and select “View Full Report.”
New Visitors Vs. Returning Visitors
A spike in new visitors to your financial advisor firm website has the potential to result from several online actions:
- A guest blog post that goes viral
- A mention of your financial advisor firm on a popular website
- A budget hike for a paid online marketing campaign such as Facebook ads
- A recently published press release highlighting your firm’s services/value offering
You can only rely on your existing clients and returning visitors for so long before your financial advisor firm’s new business slows down. Pay close attention to the new visitor vs. returning visitor metric and you will obtain valuable insight into whether your website is “sticky”, meaning able to bring one-time visitors back for subsequent visits.
This metric also details the number of new visitors expressing an interest in your financial services, expanding your firm’s reach all the more. An added benefit is the metric’s gauge of returning visitors after a specific outreach such as an email marketing campaign.
How to do it: Comparing new online visitors to repeat visitors is as easy as looking at the “% New Sessions” report column on the Google Analytics Dashboard.
Channel-Specific Traffic
Wouldn’t it be great to know where online visitors were before they visited your website? This insight is possible with an analysis of channel-specific traffic. The channel is the metaphorical door that online visitors use to find your financial advisor firm’s website. An analysis of your financial advisor firm’s leading mediums is essential to gauge the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.
This metric also empowers you to view exactly what causes a reduction in online visits in the event your website experiences a decrease in online traffic. Furthermore, channel-specific traffic reveals where your digital marketing campaign excels.
There are four primary channels to key in on. Direct channels are especially important as they represent instances when individuals enter your financial advisor firm’s URL to visit your website. This means they already know you. This channel also represents those who started their search within the Omnibox yet visited your financial advisor site in the past. The Omnibox auto-completes the web address as the web user has visited your site in the past.
Social is another important channel as it indicates those who visited your firm’s website from a social media site. Pay close attention to this channel and you will find out whether your online social engagement efforts are proving effective. Referral channels detail those who visited your website from a separate website. In other words, this channel details external traffic where web surfers followed an online link from a separate domain to reach your financial advisor firm website.
How to do it: Take a look at Acquisition, click All Traffic and check out the Channels report.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is one of the most important digital marketing metrics for financial advisors. The bounce rate is the average number of online visitors who departed your firm’s website after merely visiting a particular page on your website. This initial page is the one visitors entered from, commonly referred to as the entrance page.
Each individual page of your website has its own unique bounce rate. Furthermore, bounce rates are not of equal importance. The bounce rate reveals whether your financial advisor firm’s online content is actually relevant. The bounce rate reveals if you are using the proper landing page for your paid ad campaigns.
If you find the bounce rate for a certain page of your website is high, it might be attributable to online visitors leaving the site after looking at that individual page and obtaining the information they were looking for. In other cases, online visitors transition into leads after bouncing from the all-important contact page. Alternatively, those who dislike the site’s design or usability might exit from the home page and not click on a second, third or fourth page.
How to do it: Simply click the Bounce Rate metric in Google Analytics.
