Are Adwords For Financial Advisers A Good Investment

To the uninitiated, Adwords for financial advisers can seem like an absolute silver bullet for lead generation. After all, Google generates around 4.5 billion searches per day across the world and is the number one search engine in western society. In fact, Google is considered so important to businesses that having the number one position in search results has become a fixation for financial services firms everywhere. 

In this article we’re going to cover a few issues in regards to Adwords and help you to understand if Adwords for financial advisers are actually a good investment. 

Why Adwords Are Great

In the unlikely event that you have been living under a rock, you will have interacted with Adwords at some point during your day. Adwords help businesses generate millions of leads every day which in turn help them to grow their revenue. Once set up they can generate your traffic, leads and sales almost immediately, giving you an instant ROI on your ad spend. Not only can you place your adverts right in front of people as they are searching on Google, but you can leverage their partner networks, such as YouTube and run video or display adverts based on keywords and search history. In a matter of minutes and for a few dollars a day, you can reach more people that you possibly thought imaginable.

Search ads in Adwords are particularly fantastic because you can show adverts to people who are directly searching for your services. If someone types in ‘financial adviser Dubai,’ your advert can be placed directly in front of them. Search intent is a super powerful driver and represents someone who is either research or buying mode, meaning they will be open to speaking with you.

In short, Adwords represent a quick and efficient way of reaching people who want to do business with you.

How Much Do Adwords For Financial Advisers Cost?

As with most things to do with advertising, there really is no limit to how much you can spend, so the question really should be how much do you want to spend on advertising? If you want to run adverts for yourself, then the cost will be your own time and learning experience. If you choose to work with an agency, then there will be a service fee for this. However, this isn’t the answer to the question you are looking for.

This is now where things get a little gray. Adwords for financial advisers is not like the good old days of advertising where you spend $5000 on a magazine insert and that was the cost. The cost varies on a daily basis depending on a variety of things. These are:

• Keyword Competition
• Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
• Quality Score

If you’re new to advertising online these terms will make no sense to you, so we’re going to clarify what these are and how they affect the cost of your advertising campaigns.

Keyword Competition

When using Adwords, you will select keywords to trigger your adverts. They come in three types; broad match, phrase match and exact match. Broad match keywords trigger your adverts when any word associated with your keyword is searched for, phrase match is when your keyword is used in a search term phrase. For example, if your keyword was financial adviser Dubai, someone may search for how much do financial advisers in Dubai charge? This would trigger your advert. And lastly, exact matches are if the keyword is searched for exactly.

How often your keyword is triggered depends on the way you have set it up to be matched. Broad is likely to trigger more adverts but may not necessarily be what people are looking for.

Here’s where things get more complex still. Keywords have a bid amount. What that bid amount is depends on the competition for that keyword. Very popular keywords often are expensive to bid on. It’s not uncommon to see bids of $20-30 per click on highly competitive keywords. This means if you only have a budget of $100 per day, 5 clicks and your daily budget is spent and there’s no guarantee that you will have generated a lead with those clicks either.

Cost Per Acquisition

How much are you willing to spend to acquire a new client? How much is a client worth to you? This really should be a pretty simple equation to work out. Each of your clients should have a Life Time Value (LTV). You should know how much each new client makes you over the time of your working relationship and how much it costs to acquire one. If it costs you $1000 to acquire a new client but they stay with you for 10 years and earn you $100,000 then you can be safe in the knowledge that you will be making that money back pretty quickly. Ultimately this is something you should know and have this as a marketing cost already worked out.

Quality Score

Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the water… Google wants people to find the most relevant answers and solutions to their searches as possible. This means they want to show the best adverts to people searching. The better results that advertisers get, the more money they spend on Adwords. So how does quality score affect Adwords for financial advisers? Well, unlike the way the rest of the world works, spending the most money doesn’t guarantee you the top spot. In fact, bidding the most amount on a keyword doesn’t mean that you are outranking any of your competitors. A low quality score will end up increasing the amount it costs to not only show ads, but to generate leads. A high quality score will reduce the amount. 

So, to answer the question, how much does Adwords for financial advisers cost? It depends on quite a variety of factors. The above factors are only a small insight into what you need to consider when running Adwords for financial advisers. There’s a lot more that you need to pay attention to, to ensure that your campaigns stay in budget and actually deliver you results.

You’re Going To Need A Website

Adwords requires you to have a destination to send people to, for the most part, at least. There actually is not the option of generating leads directly from the search results through online forms, but this may not always be the option that is most suitable for you.

In order to be able to successfully run adverts you will need to have a url destination link to send people to. This means you’re going to need to have a website. 

Remember the quality score thing we spoke about just now? Well your website is a direct reflection of that, so your website needs to be good too. What do we mean by good? Well, you will need to have the same type of content on your landing page as what your advert is talking about. You can’t send someone to a page about booking a pension transfer meeting if the advert is talking about retirement funds. Actually, you can, but your quality score will be super low, it’ll cost you loads of money and probably won’t generate you any leads. If you are considering the cost of running Adwords for financial advisers, this dramatically increases it if you need to have one built.

Are The Searches Worth It?

When thinking about what keywords you want to target you need to look at how many searches there are actually taking place each month to decide if it’s worth bidding on. Again, you can go so much deeper in this and have very specific keywords that may not be super high search volume, but very high converting. This is another strategic element you will need to consider.

A quick search for the term, ‘ financial adviser’ brings back only 30 searches per month in the UAE. The CPC (Cost Per Click) for this term is $6.44. Not outrageously high, but also not super cheap. Is it worth bidding on? Well, that depends. If you take a look in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) you’ll find that not many financial services firms are running ads for this, but those that are, have deep pockets indeed. Are you prepared to take them on? 

There’s a number of things to think about for this search term. On the one hand there aren’t many searches, but there definitely are people searching. There isn’t a huge amount of advertising competition, but the competitors are able to spend big. These considerations are all part of how you build up your keyword lists and search terms.

Conclusion

Are Adwords for financial advisers a good investment? Yes, they most certainly can be. We have seen unbelievable success in Adwords campaigns for clients in the past. They may also not be right for you, depending on how much you are willing to invest to make them work for you. Running them for a week to see how they get on isn’t going to do anything for you. You will need to be prepared to invest in running the adverts for a minimum of three months before you can realistically make an accurate assessment of the campaign. 

If you want to learn more about how Adviser Leads agave helped businesses to generate more leads, check out our 3-step guide to explosive lead generation by clicking the button below.