Find out how you can develop your own pay-per-click marketing campaign for your exchange-traded fund through this quickstart guide to setting up your ETF’s first PPC campaign.
ETFs are going strong. The ETF landscape has multiple opportunities for investors to flourish, ranging from thematic fund investments to the rapid growth and popularity of fixed income ETFs.
If your investment management firm wants to increase its assets under management, particularly through your ETF offering, you’ll need a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to spread the word about your ETF. In essence, PPC is a digital marketing model where you, the advertiser, pay a price every time an ad of yours is clicked by users.
Once you’re already aware of the major benefits of using PPC to market your ETF and the elements of an effective PPC campaign for ETFs, this quickstart guide can assist you in setting up your PPC campaign.
Let’s now discuss how you can start your very first PPC campaign to get more investors for your ETF.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Creating Your First PPC Campaign for ETF
A PPC campaign is one of the surefire ways to promote and sell your investment management company’s ETF products. As early as 2019, during the pre-pandemic days, Bloomberg’s “ETFs in Depth” conference in New York has long figured out that without effective marketing, ETFs can’t grow and prosper. They should go hand-in-hand, like a horse and carriage.
You can set up your first PPC campaign on Google to market your ETF products as long as you have your own Google Ads account. However, there are many other PPC management platforms besides Google Ads, where you can pay to get eyes and clicks toward your ETF offerings. Those include Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads), Reddit Ads, Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads), Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and many others.
These PPC ad platforms include companies that follow the Google format of letting you decide when, where, and which keywords would advertise your ETF company with a handy app. Others take care of everything, from getting clicks to dealing with the creative side of advertising, giving advertisers a relatively hands-off experience.
For Google Ads (the most popular PPC ad platform), you just need to log in to your account to get started. Go to the left tab and select “All Campaigns”, “Overview”, and “New Campaign”. Choose your campaign objective. Afterwards, choose a campaign type. Next, select the “Search” option since you’re starting a PPC campaign.
You’ll see a prompt to choose the options for reaching your goal. You can choose more than one of those options.
To create a conversion action, install your conversion tracking tag. Email your ETF website’s webmaster for it or install the code yourself onto your webpage. Afterwards, you can name your PPC campaign.
An ETF cannot grow without effective marketing. To get more investors for your ETF product, consider advertising it using a PPC campaign.
Step 2: Allotting Budget and Bidding
To continue with your campaign, the next step is to choose your budget and bidding strategy.
You need to allot the amount of money you’re able to pay for each campaign daily, which would be your PPC advertising budget. Your bid is the amount you’re willing to pay for keywords if a user searches for that term and then clicks on your ETF PPC ad.
Keep in mind when setting your average daily budget that you might spend more or less than your budget depending on campaign activity.
For the entire month, your investment management company cannot spend an amount greater than your daily budget multiplied by the average number of days for the month.
Do some research to learn the amount of money needed to rank decently on search engines. There are industries requiring higher cost-per-click (CPC) than others. The higher the CPC, the greater the budget your asset management firm should assign to it.
Google and most PPC platforms also offer three bidding strategy sections—automated, manual, and recommended. You can choose the portfolio strategy you wish to implement. Each of those strategies enables your investment management firm to select a target cost per action.
Step 3: Selecting Your PPC Campaign Settings
When configuring your PPC ad campaign settings, you’ll be given the option to advertise on other networks. You can broadcast your PPC campaigns on the Google Search Network and Display Network. This means your adverts will get included in Google SERPs and Google search partners.
Campaign settings for Bing Ads and Twitter should work the same way. You’ll get a prompt asking you where on Bing or Twitter you could advertise, like on Bing’s SERPs and Twitter’s top tweets or trending topics.
The higher the tier of your package, the wider your spread—but the more money you’ll have to allocate for it as well.
You’ll also have to select where your campaign will run in terms of locations. At first, you have only a few target options. However, you can narrow your options later down the line if required. You also have a choice on who to target and exclude.
After making your location choice, you’ll then select the language or languages your target customers speak, campaign URL options, audience segments, ad schedule, dynamic search ad settings, and campaign start and end dates.
Step 4: Deciding on Your Keywords and Ads
The keywords and ads section is where you’ll make your first ad group of many. Ad groups are individual groups within your campaign with their own ad copy and keywords you can use to promote your different ETF products.
Keywords are what your target audience types on Google to trigger your ads. Bidding on keywords should result in your ads showing up in whichever PPC ad platform/s you choose.
You can get ETF-related keyword suggestions by entering your website URL, a related page URL, or a direct link to your ETF products and services. You can enter keywords manually through match types like exact match, phrase match, or broad match.
Instead of using SEO 'for free' to rank high on a search engine, you can pay the search engine itself to show your ad along with the top search results instead.
Ensure you target the correct keywords relevant to your first PPC campaign for ETF beforehand so save money on selecting a poor keyword choice. You’ll likewise be prompted to create a responsive search ad.
These dynamic ads adapt to create more relevant messages to your prospects over time. Therefore, you have to feed it multiple descriptions and headlines. It’s possible to create up to 4 descriptions and 15 headlines all about ETF and how great of an investment opportunity it is.
Your PPC platform will then switch them around depending on which ones work best on a given site or time and which keyword is being searched for. You also may pin specific headlines and descriptions to a spot if you wish.
The URL should be the landing page that your ad drives users to after clicking your PPC ad. Make sure to write high-quality ad copy that can make your prospects click on your ETF ad, but don’t use clickbait to do so.
Click on the link to learn more about the best practices for making PPC ads and ad copy.
Step 5: Extensions and Review
Extensions give your ad campaign extra homepage real estate. They enable you to give key info about your lucrative ETF product and business. They should be specific to an ad group or campaign. Make as many as you can. They’ll give your ads more search page visibility.
After you’ve reviewed everything and you’re happy with it, run your campaign. See how it performs care of its analytics data.
Once you’ve created your first PPC campaign for your asset management company’s ETF, it’s time to celebrate!
However, brace yourself. You still have to make changes to your PPC ads them over time to keep getting better results.
Unleashing your PPC campaign for marketing your ETF to the world is a bit of an experiment. You have to be flexible enough to change anything there and discover what works and what doesn’t. The more details you can provide to the platform, the more likely you can improve your PPC ads’ performance.
In Need of Help Setting Up a PPC Campaign for Your ETF?
We’ve provided the steps needed to get your first PPC campaign started and propel your ETF products to new heights and greater revenues. We are focused and experienced in helping out asset management companies and investment management firms in using PPC advertising campaigns to promote ETF products.
Book a free call with Zero Company’s PPC and ETF experts if you need extra help in doing effective ETF marketing using PPC ads!
