Your Competitors Online Aren’t Always The Folks Next Door
Today’s guest post offers some great insights about how financial institutions need to start thinking about SEO and online competition. Courtesy of Brock Ward a market research analyst for a leading digital advertising firm. For more great insights and posts related to digital marketing for any business check out his blog at http:/dbrockmanw.com
In the brick & mortar world you’re often competing for foot traffic into your door, but online the battle is for keywords and clicks to your website. This means that your traditional competitors, or local competitors, may or may not actually be competing against you online. When it comes to search engines, your competition is anyone who ranks for the same or similar keywords you do. Sometimes, it’s entities you’ve never heard of, or even worse, entities you don’t think should qualify as a competitor.
Let’s say you’re launching a new deal for Auto Loans and your primary market is Lexington, Kentucky. You offer a rate of 3%, and the guys next door are advertising 3.5%. You win, right? Wrong.
Gone are the days of driving around town looking for the best deal on a billboard. Google instantly provides anyone the information they need about any product they want. And let’s be honest, consumers today (especially younger generations) typically aren’t as concerned with brand loyalty as they are getting the best deal when they’re looking for it. In other words, just because I do checking and savings with Bank A, doesn’t mean I’m opposed to getting a loan from Bank B or C. This is why it’s important to monitor what business opportunities exist online, and realistically examine what you’re up against to achieve your goals in order to grow.
As an example, let’s look at some numbers about Auto Loans.
Google: “Auto Loan” & its variants are searched 400k-900k times monthly.
Google: for the term “Auto Loan” there are more than 75 million results.
SEM Rush: there are over 10k terms related to the term “Auto Loan”.
What this means is that in order to compete online for Auto Loans, you’re essentially going up against 75 million competitors for approximately 500k pairs of eyeballs. (Realistically I consider the top 20-30 results true competition). In addition to that, there are 10k other ways people are searching for essentially the same thing, and each instance may or may not have different results. Wow.
As keywords get more specific, search volume tapers off, but the probability of making a conversion increases – theoretically. If I perform a search for “Auto Loan Lexington KY” I am presented with about 700,000 results, and the first page begins to look familiar in terms of recognized local & national businesses. If I again tailor my search to meet my particular needs, I’m inputting “Used Auto Loan Lexington KY” and presented with the following organic results on the first page of Google:
- kyfreshstart.com (Auto Dealer)
- donjacobs.com (Auto Dealer)
- bankrate.com (Rate Aggregate)
- gatesnissan.net (Auto Dealer)
- autoloansinlexington.com (Generic Affiliate Site)
- paulmillerautoloan.com (Auto Dealer)
- kentucky.com/cars (Local publication, Auto Classifieds)
- freedomdodgechryslerjeep.com (Auto Dealer)
- donjacobsusedcars.com (Auto Dealer; Same as #2)
- glennautomall.com (Auto Dealer)
The top-10 paid (PPC, AdWords) results for the same keyword are:
- pnc.com
- federalautoloan.com
- nationwide.com/bank
- wellsfargo.com
- myautoloan.com
- lexingtonlaw.com
- we-finance-bad-credit.com
- kentuckybadcreditcarloans.com
- legacynissan.com
- bankrate.com
- kbb.com
There are a few surface-level insights we can infer from this information. First, banks or credit unions in Lexington, Kentucky that offer auto loans aren’t exactly competing online with other banks or credit unions, they’re competing with dealerships (at least for this particular keyword).
Excluding indirect lending, financial institutions are virtually non-existent to the search engine user for this term. What’s worse is that smaller institutions most likely aren’t even aware they are losing a tremendous amount of potential business because their marketing efforts are often focused solely on other financial institutions.
The good news is this: search engine results are not static. By optimizing your website and social media, your online visibility will increase and you’ll acquire more and more visitor data as time goes on. This will help to continually fine-tune your online marketing campaigns, until your site is in the top results for the keywords that matter most to you.
Of course, to perform well on any search engine in a highly competitive field (financial products are some of the most competitive products out there) requires a lot of work to be described in other posts. This post is only intended to scratch the surface and encourage a new thought process on the topic of online competition.
If you’re curious what keywords your site is currently ranking for, and who you’re competing with online, you can generate a free report at http://www.semrush.com
Try Before You Buy: Split Testing Creatives On Google Content Network
I’m fairly certain that a lot of advertising sales reps hate my guts. I don’t really blame them either, as a former salesman I’ll be the first to admit that I’m never going to be an easy client for them to work with.
As a performance marketer I need to see measurable results and in a hurry if I’m going to keep spending. Honestly I’m simply amazed at the high CPM rates that some sites ask for. Usually these super high rates are with publishers that are based offline; print, television, etc.
I cringe when I hear a quote for a $XX CPM rate on a placement only to see Google Adsense banners showing up in the same spot. Even worse than overpaying for media is doing so with under performing creatives. The fact is that most publishers have more impressions available than the reps can sell. These impressions typically get monetized with display networks; Adsense being the most popular. Just like their search platform Google placements also known as the content network offers the ability to buy media via a self-serve platform, but the key difference is that the content network is based around placement targets instead of searches.
An example of text ad placements on USA Today's website
What does this mean to you?
Simply put if a website you’re interested in buying banners on has adsense enabled you can purchase and bid on spaces available via the Google content network on a CPC (cost per click) basis! CPC gives you a huge advantage when testing a new traffic source, because you’re only paying for clicks you receive and nothing else. The price you pay is relevant to the competition so less popular sites will be cheaper just like less competitive search terms. By running banners on the GCN (google content network) you can focus your efforts on building up a high CTR and get a feel for how the traffic will convert at a much smaller cost and with zero insertion orders to sign. Basically put all those claims in the media kit to the real test.
How do you know if a site has GCN banner slots available? Use the placements tool in adwords when creating a campaign or you can try the Google Adplanner Tool you just need a google account to use the free tool. Not only will you get great demographic info about most sites; you’ll see exactly what GCN placements and sizes are available.
Start split testing!
Have 4 ideas for a banner? Need to test a new headline? Think this sites traffic quality is poor? Find out now with all the great metrics, reporting , and conversion tracking you get with a search campaign. In the past I would use GCN to test creatives then take my best creatives and search for direct to site buys (basically cut google out). This was an opportunity to pay less, but with some of the CPM rates traditional media publishers charge you might still wind up at a lower CPM rate just buying traffic from Google.
This doesn’t often make for very happy sales reps; in fact some sites have wised up enough to block Adsense ads on certain pages they want to sell space on. Either way if your marketing dept. doesn’t have a big bank budget you should at least take advantage of an opportunity to do some pre-buy testing, optimization, or use cheaper rates as some deal leverage. (see why they hate me?)
If you’re looking to “get the word out” or “raise awareness” with online media you’re only going to be successful if you have ads that actually perform and get action. Burning money buying up lots of impressions with lame flash banners is never going to give you the ROI you’re looking for. Get the data you need and start paying for performance not just space.
Social Media And Soap Operas
The financial marketing hot topic of social media has long had two groups forming; one claiming that social is a wonderful new form of media and a must for any institution while the more skeptical group points out that it might be a total waste of time. I think people from either side of the fence would agree that the financial niche as a whole isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of social marketing.
As an affiliate marketer I had little concerns about awareness and branding; my only job was to make sales and generate a positive ROI on my ad spend. This required me to always be on the hunt for new and less competitive sources of traffic. In other words new places where I can buy advertising. I wanted to find hubs, places of gathering, areas of interest, etc. where I could spread my message. Do people want to see my advertising? Nope, but that’s okay I’m a marketer I distract people for a living.
Finding new high traffic places to buy media from is one thing, but most of the social chats I hear involve user engagement on the platforms themselves. The whiners say nobody finds the world of finance and banking interesting and that we’re not hip enough to hang out on social media.
Old School Engagement
Need some help? Allow me to introduce you to a “user engagement” expert that the boomer generation might have more in common with. Proctor and Gamble Productions Inc. These guys wanted to get lots of people to “like” them and subscribe to their marketing for soap and detergents. So they produced this little show called “As The World Turns”, which was pretty successful considering it was on the air for 54 years. (talk about engagement!)
Was this a powerful drama about stains that just wouldn’t come out? No. In fact it had nothing to do with detergents or soap at all. (nobody cares about soap) I’ve never seen an episode, which makes sense considering P&G probably didn’t consider young males to be prime buyers of household laundry detergent.
The lesson to be learned here is that P&G productions blazed a new frontier when they produced a prime time show. They saw an opportunity in this cool new media called “Television” and decided they wanted to build their own hub for which they could pummel their target audience with messages about soap. All the lies, the cheating, the murder, the action, and the drama was all just to sell more soap.
So are Facebook pet photo contests the new soap opera? Who knows, but at the end of the day those who want to increase sales with social media or any media; need to come to terms with the fact that nobody likes ads or wants to be marketed too. It’s our job to find new and creative ways to spread our message and get people to pay attention to it.
Start Optimizing Your Financial Adwords Campaigns Right Now
Without a doubt Google Adwords is a seriously lucrative opportunity for the financial marketer. Of course this opportunity is neither a secret nor is it cheap in our niche. Most financial services keywords start at about $2.50 and can quickly go above $15 per click. Once again that is PER CLICK not per lead, per sale, but per click to your landing page. Why does anybody pay this much? It’s because we know that search traffic converts very well.
The amount of people who can/have financial services is incredibly broad, but the number of people who are shopping for them is much smaller and search allows us to laser target this group; an invaluable service. Today’s post is a quick overview of some super easy ways to get your campaigns on track and start getting more for your ad dollars.
1. Separate Search And Content Networks Always.
A very common mistake that’s made by search PPC newbies is to take the unintentionally lazy approach to campaign setup. When you create a campaign one of the first fields you are asked to fill out is the target audience of your ads. What often gets missed and results in terrible quality score killing CTR’s are the device and network parameters.
- Device: Choose which types of devices your ads should display too. In short just pick 1 and build a campaign. Don’t waste your ad dollars displaying ads for mortgage applications to people searching on iphones; odds are they won’t convert and your pages aren’t optimized for mobile anyway. You could also be paying a MUCH cheaper CPC rate by buying this traffic directly from mobile brokers. I usually choose Desktops only.
- Network: Put your banner/content network advertisements into totally separate campaigns than your search ads. The ads themselves, the targeting, etc. are totally different and you don’t want ones performance effecting the other. (typically the banner ads don’t do near as well as search and will kill your quality score… which is costing you too much money)
2. See Search Terms.
This magical button alone is worth the click costs of Adwords. When you use the “see search terms” button you get to see the actual searches/keywords that generated impressions of your ads. Most Search rookies are using “broad” keywords which opens them up to recieving wasted impressions/clicks from a wide variety of keywords that have little to do with their campaign. An example would be seeing searches for small business grants in a campaign for business loans. By checking these results you can with a few clicks list those irrelevant terms as “negative keywords” which means Google will prevent your ads from showing to those searches and charging you for expensive and worthless clicks.
3. More campaigns = more money
Search marketing is really easy when you spend other peoples money. When it’s your own dime and ROI is a factor I doubt you’ll see any perks in targeting all the traffic containing the word “mortgages”. A very common mistake is to jam pack 1 campaign with every possible keyword we can think of that is relevant. What you should be doing is creating multiple campaigns with smaller groups of tightly relevant keywords with relevant ads that point to a relevant landing page. This results in high quality scores, high conversion rates, and those crazy high ROI’s we’re after in the first place. An example.
30 year fixed rate
Refinancing my home
How to get approved for a HELOC loan?
All the above terms are related to the broad category of mortgages, but three very separate components. Do you think an ad for 30 year fixed mortgages would get lots of clicks from people who want HELOC’s? It won’t… That’s why we go to the time and effort of creating small groups of keywords with relevant ads that point to very relevant landing pages. Not only does this improve our conversions it also makes our ads more relevant to searches and since Google just loves that we’ll also get discounted CPC costs!
Use the 3 tips above and I have no doubt you’ll see an immediate improvement and decreased costs in your search campaigns. Financial Services PPC is one of the top 3 most competitive and expensive niches to market in; so there is little room or budget for common mistakes. These are very beginner tactics so stay tuned for more advanced posts in the future!
Social Metrics That Actually Matter
A lot of financial institutions have jumped head first into the world of social media. The result has been an increasingly number of oddball terms working their way into our KPI’s. Likes, tweets, retweets, pins, shares, @replies, and the list goes on. The questions that repeatedly come up are “What are these metrics?” and “Which ones are important?”. For today’s post I’d like to start a little discussion on just what some of these goofy terms really mean and how we can use them to create logical goals that will actually be worth our time and resources.
Lets build a list…
List building has long been an important part of every marketing teams arsenal. Lists are great, because they provide an opportunity for us to continually send our message to a group of people who are qualified to purchase our products and services. Most CU’s and Banks have already gotten the hang of this concept and put it into action with their email and direct mail campaigns. There are several tactics for building an email list from giving away white papers to good old fashioned door prizes “drop your card in the fish bowl”.
What social media has done is create a growing number of synonyms for the word “subscriber”. Really that’s all there is to it. When somebody “likes” your page or “follows” you what they are doing is saying “hey I find you and the things you’re saying relevant to my interests please share this stuff with me on a regular basis”. We want to get more facebook likes and more twitter followers, because this will grow our “list” of people that we can share our message too and communicate with. It doesn’t matter if it’s just branding or a direct sales tactic the more qualified subscribers we have the better.
Quality over quantity…
The number of financial institutions that can offer services to everybody in the entire world is fairly small. Most of us are local, regional, or specialized. Sure having 25 million followers on twitter would be great, but if only 2,000 of them are in your target market than any funds spent acquiring the remaining 24,998,000 might of been better allocated. Skeptics of social in the financial world quickly point the finger at the lackluster numbers of likes/followers/etc that most bank and CU pages have. While I won’t argue many could certainly make a better effort, but I wouldn’t say this is unexpected. Regardless of how much money and time we spend on advertising/branding the only people with a real interest in financial services are those who are in the market for them. This number will always pale in comparison to those who currently have and use financial services, but that’s a topic for another day.
Get things viral…
When someone “likes” your post or “retweets” your tweet what they are saying is “I found this interesting and I bet somebody else would too”. Is this something you want for your business? Of course it is! This is what we have for years referred to as word of mouth marketing, but now we suddenly have a way to statistically measure it in real time (and that’s really freaking cool). I’m not a fan of the buzz word “user engagement” in fact I kind of hate it, because it prompts us to abandon all these wonderful measurable metrics social media can offer in search of yet another bunch of intangible marketing bologna.
Stick that in your KPI and smoke it…
Social is here too stay, but it surely won’t stay the same. The next big thing will always be just around the corner and with that the game and the names of our metrics will change. Something far more constant will be our tactics for selling, branding, and spreading the word about our products and services. Focus on what social metrics align with your current marketing strategy and what you have the resources work with and you’ll soon have goals worth achieving.
Instantly Improve Facebook Campaigns With Even Distribution
A lot of people in the financial marketing world are talking about social media, but disappointingly I see most of the conversations revolving around participating in social media and engaging users. Have we not come to realize that Facebook has created one of the most powerful and cost effective advertising platforms ever? I’ll save my rants for another post, but in the meantime for those who are using platforms like Facebook for advertising here are some tips that will help you quickly optimize your targeting and ad performance.
Creating a Facebook campaign can be a daunting task at first. There are more targeting options than marketers have ever had access to before, and while this offers incredible opportunities it can also allow for plenty of failures. One of the most common mistakes facebook newbies make is that they don’t take advantage of the ability to precisely segment their demographics.
After spending $XXX,XXX on facebook ads i’ve learned two rules that I follow for every single campaign.
1. Always check the “exact match” box for age targeting.
If you don’t check the box than you’re allowing facebook to extend your campaign reach based on other targeting variables. What does that mean? Your mortgage campaign with an age range of 25-45 could have ad impressions wasted on 13 year olds. Seems like 13 is way off from 25 right? It is, but that’s what the system is capable of doing if you don’t target precisely.
2. Always target genders separately.
When I recommend targeting genders separately what I’m referring too is always checking either the male or female boxes for each ad you create. Since you’re a financial marketer and you want to target both males and females what you will wind up with are two identical advertisements except for the gender variable in your campaign. Why should we do this? Simply because men and women are different. We think different, we act different, and we certainly respond to advertising differently. Now before you get crazy ideas of making campaigns “masculine” or “feminine” realize that real objective here to simply find targeting variables that will impact campaign performance and segment them.
An example: Lets say you’re targeting a local college, and in this college women out number men 8-1. If you were to create 1 facebook ad to target this demographic then it’s likely that the majority of your ad impressions will be seen by women. For all you know men could respond incredibly well to the image/copy you’ve chosen, but since you didn’t segment the demographic you’ll never know this.
Start Optimizing…
Now that we know to target ages exactly and we have the ball rolling with a bare minimum of two ads (one for each gender) in our campaign lets optimize even further. A very important aspect of several social ad systems that every marketer must understand is the lack of even distribution amongst targeting variables.
When you make a campaign with an age range of 20-40 years old, your ad impressions are not shown in an even manner. This is because the demographic is not evenly divided. There isn’t an equal number of 21, 22, 23, or 37 year olds in your demographic. The broader you go the more at risk you are of having all your impressions eaten up by the dominant group, but what if the minority performs the best? How can we make sure everybody gets eyeballs on our ads? Simple just duplicate your campaigns.
WARNING!!!- This is a really old chart from 2007 I just used it to show how the age demos are uneven. (40+ users are now a very large demographic!)
Here’s a sample of how a campaign could look:
Females-21/25-usa-adcopy#1-Adimage#1
Males-21/25-usa-adcopy#1-Adimage#1
Females-26/30-usa-adcopy#1-adimage#1
Memales-26/30-usa-adcopy#1-adimage#1
I broke down the age group 21-30 into 4 separate ads that use identical creatives. Now realize that you can and should do this with ALL of the variables facebook has to offer. I’m sure you’re thinking “that could be hundreds of ads in my campaign!?!” and you would be correct.
Since creating and managing thousands of ads is as big of a headache as it sounds, you should start by testing important variables 1 at a time and go from there. Here are some examples that you already know make people vastly different.
- Gender
- Age
- Location (country,state,city,zip)
- Education
- Income
- Race
- Marital Status
Social platforms offer a lot more than the short list above so start creating more ads, collecting more data, and you’ll surely start making more sales.
3 Free Tools To Help Optimize Your Campaigns
Always Be Split Testing
The single biggest advantage of online media vs traditional media is the ease of tracking and optimization. Tracking is what allows us to optimize and as we all know optimization is what allows us to get more leads, make more sales, and make more money.
If you noticed my “Ogilvy-esque” logo for this blog you may of guessed that I’m a big fan of split-testing. Why waste time and energy with guess work when we have cheap and organized data right at our finger tips? Below are 3 free tools that everyone can use to make their ad campaigns and websites convert better.
1. Conversion Pixels: Conversion pixels are awesome little lines of code that when fired tell us that a conversion has been made. A conversion can mean lots of things from a completed loan application, an email submit, leads, sales, and so much more. One of the most popular online advertising platforms that offers easy conversion tracking is Google Adwords.
If you’re not using conversion tracking then you’re not optimizing your campaigns, and if your not optimizing campaigns then you’re wasting money. Want to know what keywords are generating the most submitted loan applications? Need to see which ad generated more sales? Which landing page version gets more emails? All questions that can be answered with conversion pixels. Best of all they’re easy to create and install. How To Install A Google Conversion Pixel.
(Note/rant: If any of you’re applications are hosted/provided by a 3rd party you are going to need them to place conversion scripts for you. Not all vendors can do this as easily/quickly/cheaply as we’d like them too)
2. Google Website Optimizer: Have a hunch that your users will click on orange buttons more than blue ones? No need for a discussion just create an A/B split test. Google website optimizer is a free tool that allows you to quickly and easily conduct A/B and Multi-variate tests with your sites design. Practically every element of your website or landing page can be tested or optimized from colors, buttons, fonts, copy, images, and more. The value of this tool goes far beyond optimizing just the website. Split testing offline marketing materials can be difficult, expensive, and tough to track, but by conducting these tests online we can have a much easier time making sure our message works before it ever goes to print. Learn more about optimizer here
3. Google Analytics: Okay so this might be a complete no-brainer for some, but for those not in the loop Google analytics is still one of the best traffic analytic tools on the market and best of all it’s totally free. I’ve had very few complaints about analytics until their recent change to block keyword data from showing from logged in user searches. If “not provided” has suddenly become one of your top searches you’re certainly not alone.
So there you go 3 simple ways to help optimize your campaigns with measurable results.
