When it comes to monitoring the results of paid advertising for financial advisors, digital marketing performance measurement tools have come a long way. When compared to traditional forms of advertising when you had to run the ad and wait prolonged periods of time to see if anyone responds, digital marketing gives you nearly instantaneous feedback on how your campaign is performing.
With this detailed level of measurement available, it can be easy to lose sight of the most important performance metrics that can help you determine the success of your financial advisor paid advertising campaigns. But before you get caught up in measurement tools, you need to make sure you have taken all of the steps to create a successful campaign from launch to measurement.
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Define Your Target Audience(s)
Before you can begin any campaign, you must clearly define the characteristics of your audience. This will help determine your performance in reaching people that meet your audience criteria. Most financial advisors have multiple personas of clients, and they will have their own distinguishing characteristics. Therefore, you should create multiple audience profiles and design your messaging and offers based on their specific criteria.
Define Your Objectives
Once you have the audience defined, it’s essential to define your objectives. It’s impossible to measure your success if you haven’t set goals or objectives. These objectives can vary, based on the goal of your campaign. For example, if your campaign is focused on awareness and branding, you could be monitoring impressions vs. clicks and can set up your campaign accordingly.
If you’re looking to grow your list of contacts, using a lead generation tool such as Facebook advertising is a good option. You can measure your results and determine if your goals are being met. If not, you can make a change right away or stop the campaign altogether, another advantage of using digital marketing.
Set a Budget
While there are many advantages to using digital marketing, controlling your budget in real-time may be one of the most important and beneficial features, especially for financial advisory firms that require short-term results. By correctly targeting and reaching your specific audiences, you can get the most out of even a small digital marketing budget.
A word of caution, however: Without setting up the proper budget limits, you can easily overspend in a short amount of time without realizing it. If you’re not sure how much you can afford to spend, you can set campaigns for a shorter amount of time and then extend them if they are effective and you have the budget to increase your spend.
Research Keywords
When it comes to PPC advertising, keywords can make the difference between a positive ROI, or a campaign that misses the mark. The key is to strike the right balance between a specific or exact phrase match that will reach a more specific audience, and high volume/broad match keywords that can deliver more clicks and conversions. Basically, you want to be specific enough to reach the right people, but not so specific that you miss out on valuable leads.
This part of the paid advertising process can take some practice and finesse to find the right keyword balance, but it is crucial to get this step right. Partnering with an experienced digital marketing agency can take most of the burden from your shoulders, however. Because keyword research can be time-consuming, consider partnering with a digital marketing agency that specializes in PPC and paid search advertising.
Check Out the Competition
The true hallmark of any successful digital marketing campaign involves checking out what your competition is doing. While you won’t always be able to know exactly what keywords the competition is using and how much they’re spending, you can get a pretty good idea based on how frequently their ads show up on Google, social media and across the internet. You can also tell if they’re doing retargeting or other types of digital marketing display ads across the web.
Because the more popular keywords likely have a lot of competition, someone with a bigger budget could be aiming for the same audience. With a solid competitive analysis, you’re able to decide if you want to compete for that specific keyword knowing that you’ll likely be outbid or adjust your keywords accordingly. It might be as simple as adjusting your audience to a geographic area closer to your business if the larger advertiser is state-wide or serves all of the U.S.
Optimize Your Website
Once you’ve worked so hard to get people to click on your ads, make sure they’re not disappointed when they arrive on your website. Disappointment can happen because your website isn’t optimized for mobile, or most likely because you didn’t create a separate landing page for that specific ad or ad set. For example, if you’re targeting a specific type of investor and your ad or search query takes them to your general homepage. They won’t quickly see information about the messaging you mentioned in your ad, and that could be a click that didn’t turn into a conversion. Instead, create unique landing pages based on the individual ad messaging. This can also help you track clicks with that unique URL.
Measure Your Results
With any type of marketing campaign, measuring your results and analytics is a must for gauging the overall success of the campaign, as well as ways you can improve upon future campaigns. While there are dozens of metrics you can track, here is a detailed explanation of the most common and vital digital marketing metrics:
Reach: The total number of people who see your content
Impressions: The number of times your content was displayed, whether it was clicked on or not
Click Rate: This is a percentage of your content that received clicks
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The ratio of users who clicked on a link to the number of users who viewed the content
Cost Per Click: The cost of each click you received within a specific campaign
Conversions: When a user completes a desired action, such as filling out a form or requesting a call
Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who completed the conversion
