Wealth Management Firm PPC Advertising Campaign

For confidentiality reasons, client’s name has been withheld from this case study.

The Challenge

The client was initially interested in exploring paid digital advertising to see if that could feed their sales pipeline. A traditional lead generation campaign using Google Search was started. It soon became clear that this was not producing the hoped-for results. This is a challenge that marketing often faces – first efforts don’t work, now what?

The Keystone Click team together with the firm took a step back to more fully explore the overall customer journey for this type of product and where their overall marketing efforts were focused within that journey. Wealth management is a long-term relationship sale that requires a great deal of trust before people are ready to become a “lead.” The client was newer and smaller than other firms in their competitive environment, so they needed to build awareness AND trust before moving to direct lead-generation marketing tactics.

The Process

Keystone Click recommended Dynamic Google Display Advertising as it had the following advantages:

• PPC advertising has a proven track record of expanding awareness
• The Display Network is large with wide placement opportunities
• It has good options for audience targeting for financial interests
• It is affordable relative to search advertising (financial keywords are expensive!) and other forms of advertising

We opted for dynamic ad placement to take advantage of Google’s machine learning for optimizing the best placement and combination of elements for our ads. Images and text elements not only had to be appealing to the target audience but also pass compliance standards for the industry.

The campaign began with awareness as our primary goal and bidding strategy. We tracked the usual “health of the campaign” goals such as Impressions, Click Through Rate, Cost per Click, and Conversions. With an eye to the future, we also set up tracking for several engagement and conversion goals as we knew that lead conversion was our ultimate goal.

The Result

Results were immediately noticeable.

Website traffic had been steady and low leading into the campaign at roughly 160 users a month. In the first month of the campaign, we had 985 website visitors.

We continued to optimize the campaign over the course of the next year including campaign bidding strategies as well as improved creative. At first, we focused our bidding goals on awareness and engagement measures. Did the user click through to the site, spend more time on the site than the average user, or visit more pages than the average user?

Once we felt the campaign was performing well and we had several months of awareness to build on, we began optimizing the campaign toward conversion goals – event tracking on the website such as link clicks, phone number clicks, and form submissions.

Ad creative and website landing pages were also updated with an eye toward increased conversions.

In a little over one year, this campaign delivered stunning results:

• 5.7 million impressions
• 52,795 clicks to the website
• 2,700% website traffic increase Year over year
• 4015 total conversions (engagement + action)
• 218 total action conversions

Good marketing learns from past efforts. Successful campaigns happen when the team understands where they are connecting to the buyer in their journey, sets and monitors appropriate goals for each stage of the campaign, and continually optimizes based on insights.

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