By Craig Foster, Director of Digital Media.
Have you ever wondered how your marketing campaigns stack up against others when aiming to turn prospects for independent financial advisors into your clients? As digital marketers for financial advisors, we surely have. When testing the comparative performance of your campaigns versus “the field”, it’s notoriously difficult to decipher and isolate the important factors that go into a marketing campaign, without which you can’t effectively run a comparative analysis. When examining benchmarks from analytic sources like WordStream, financial advisors run the risk of getting lumped into the entire finance and insurance industry. You may find yourself compared against some big banks, financial institutions, and insurers that have vastly different marketing goals, target audiences, budgets, and business models, all of which may lead to an inaccurate comparison of independent financial advisors’ marketing campaigns.
The most strategic and cost-effective digital marketing strategy for independent financial advisors is more targeted, applied specifically to local markets versus national campaigns, has small budgets, shorter run times, and smaller audiences. In essence, this is a strategy defined by doing more with less. To execute such a strategy, you need to know what your campaign performance expectations should be. After reviewing over three years of data, millions of ad impressions, and thousands of campaigns across the entire country, we are presenting a comprehensive performance benchmark for Independent Financial Advisor Facebook Ad Campaigns.
In this analysis, we are going to dig a little deeper than just the topline numbers. We will discuss some of the best and worst months to be running campaigns. We will look at the cost per action, meaning the person taking the action you are looking for them to do, be it filling out a lead form, watching a video, viewing a landing page, and more. And to dig even deeper, we will break down the cost-per-lead for people filling out a lead form to provide you with the crucial information needed to help you turn a lead into a client.
To start, let’s take a look at the top-line numbers:
From our research of all campaigns, we see a cost-per-click (CPC) of $1.69, a click-through-rate (CTR) of 2.32%, a conversion rate including all types of conversions at 12.6% with a $6.12 cost (CPA), and for lead form submission campaigns the conversion rate is 10.2% and $40.26 cost-per-lead (CPL).
You may wonder how that compares to the benchmarks put out by WordStream. They show in their latest benchmarks for the Finance and Insurance industry the following: a CTR of 0.58% (0.89% for all Facebook ads), a CPC of $3.89 ($1.68 all Facebook), an 8.98% Conversion rate* (9.11% all Facebook), and a CPA of $41.28 ($19.68 all Facebook). As you can see, when you have highly targeted campaigns delivering the right message, you should see results above industry benchmarks.
*Wordstream measures conversions based on the goal of the advertiser
From this, you may be wondering when the best time is to be marketing for financial advisors. Of course, if you’re not marketing, you’re losing market share to those that are, so in practice, the best time is all the time. But still, it’s crucial to know what times of year marketing campaigns can be expected to perform better than others. There is only a negligible difference in CPL between the best and the worst month. But based on the numbers, July, February, January June, and August should historically give you the best (lowest) CPL. And for those advisors that love to do dinner events and seminars, watch out for the end of the year. January through August show consistent performance for events, but the CPL steadily increases with November and December, adding up to be the worst months for your CPL.
We hope this gives you a solid benchmark for your marketing expectations and provides a gauge on how your campaigns should be performing. Stay tuned for our next data dive into ad campaigns, where we’ll talk about Google analytics and uncovering best practices and expectations for independent financial advisors’ cross-platform lead generation campaigns.
About the Author: Craig comes to us after 7 years at an agency and working independently in digital marketing, focusing on digital campaign creation and strategy. He did most of his work solving data problems and coming up with data-driven solutions and strategies. Craig grew up in the Boston area and graduated with a BS in Business Administration from Johnson and Wales University. When not working on digital marketing you might find him coaching a CrossFit class or spending time with his daughter.
