Google Ads works as a business growth channel for financial advisors, but in reality only one Google Ads campaign type can actually help.
These are search campaigns. They are a powerhouse. They catch people already looking for a mortgage or life cover and advisors get to show text based ads to them alongside other (organic/unpaid) results.
Other common campaign types are called Display, YouTube and Performance Max. These can spend the same budget on people who are not nearly as interested in your services.
Here is the whole picture, I try to cover a lot.
Why search is the one that works for advisors
Somebody typing “mortgage broker LOCATION” or “income protection quote” has already decided they have a problem.
You are not creating demand, you are catching it. That is worth paying more per click for, and it is why the cost comparison advisors make with Facebook is usually the wrong comparison.
“Google is way more expensive than Facebook” is the objection I hear most. We have run mortgage campaigns on Google at around $80,000 a month, and the cost per lead sat in the $45 to $55 range.
That’s someone who has a high intent. That means they are more likely to pick up the phone. More likely to engage in conversation (and remember they filled out a form). And they are more likely to have a problem/need that you can serve.
That means business for you.
A Facebook native lead form can get you leads for cheap. A couple dollars even. But don’t expect the same close rate on leads downloading a First Home Buyer guide vs. typing in “mortgage rates today”.
Current lead benchmarks, from our own accounts:
- Mortgage leads off a landing page: $45 to $55
- Insurance leads: $70 and up, roughly double what they cost in late 2025
- Facebook native lead forms: around $24, at noticeably lower quality
- Life insurance on Google: into the multiple hundreds this year
That last figure is the argument against advertising life cover directly.
Going at life insurance product-first is the straight line approach and it is the most expensive lead in the market. Enter through income protection or mortgage protection instead, both of which lead into the same conversation at a fraction of the cost.
The campaign types, and which ones deserve your money
Google currently offers Search, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, Video, Shopping and App campaigns.
- Search: Text ads matched to what somebody typed into Google. This is the one. Almost all of an advisor’s budget belongs here.
- Performance Max: One campaign that spends across every Google surface at once, with very little visibility into where. For a firm with a big brand and a lot of conversion data it can work. For an advisor spending $2,000 a month it mostly finds the cheapest inventory, which is display, which is not where your clients are.
- Demand Gen: The replacement for Discovery campaigns, running in the YouTube, Discover and Gmail feeds. Interruption advertising with better targeting than Display. Useful as a remarketing layer once search is working, not as a lead source on day one.
- Display: Banner ads across roughly two million sites. Cheap clicks, almost no intent. The only version worth running is remarketing to people who already hit your landing page.
- Video: YouTube. Good for awareness and genuinely good for warming up an audience that already knows you. People arrive on YouTube to be entertained rather than to buy insurance, and the numbers tend to show it.
- Shopping and App: Product feeds and mobile app installs. Neither applies to an advice business.
The Google Ads strategy for most advice firms is: search campaigns doing the work, a small remarketing layer catching the people who did not convert, and nothing else until both of those are profitable.
How to build the search campaign itself
I learned this job running campaigns in Manhattan, where a badly built account burns most of the day’s budget before lunch. Every dollar had a zip code, a subway line and a day-part attached to it or it was gone. Hopefully the place you are located is more forgiving on volume and no more forgiving on waste.
Account structure is where most advisor campaigns fail before the first ad is even written. The way you organize your campaigns and ad groups determines whether your ads match what someone is actually searching for, and that match is everything.
Consider wealth planning versus retirement planning. These are not the same audience. A successful 30-year-old searching for wealth planning is thinking about growing what they have built. They are not in a retirement frame of mind, and if your ad talks about retirement strategies, they will scroll straight past. When they think retirement, they think about the age of being retired. They are 30, not in their 60s. Don’t make them feel old, make them feel prosperous.
Running both services under one campaign with shared keywords and shared ads means you are writing for nobody in particular, which is how you write for nobody at all.
The same logic applies across the board. A first-home buyer searching “first home buyer mortgage broker Auckland” and someone searching “refinance mortgage” are completely different people with completely different problems. One does not own a home yet. One already does, and they want a better deal on the one they have.
The ad that speaks to a first-home buyer’s anxiety about getting into the market will not land for someone who just wants to cut their rate. Give each audience its own ad group, its own keywords and its own ad copy. That is the structure that works.
Match types matter more than most people realize
Start on phrase and exact match. Broad match with a smart bidding strategy will find volume, but on advisor budgets it finds it in the wrong places before you have the conversion data to steer it. Open up later, deliberately.
Negative keywords are where you really increase quality and the efficiency of your ad spend. Block “jobs”, “salary”, “courses”, “calculator”, “template” and “free”, then read the search terms report weekly for the first two months and keep adding. Somebody searching “mortgage advisor jobs Auckland” will click your ad and cost you the same as a real enquiry.
Location targeting: set it to presence rather than presence or interest, otherwise you pay for people overseas reading about where you are. Then exclude the regions you cannot service.
Writing ads that fit what someone is searching for
Good structure sets you up. Good ad copy means people will actually click and visit your site.
If someone searches “first home buyer mortgage broker”, your headline should say something about first home buyers. Not “mortgage services” or “talk to an expert”. The person on the other side of that search wants to know immediately that you understand their situation. If your ad looks like it was written for everyone, it reads like it was written for no one.
The same applies to refinancing. Someone searching “refinance home loan Texas” is comparing options on a loan they already have. They want to know you can beat their current rate or make the process easy. Lead with that. Do not lead with first home buyer language, because that is not their world right now.
Writing ads this way – specific to the search, specific to the audience – does more than improve click-through rates. It improves your Quality Score.
Quality Score: why getting this right means paying less per click
Google assigns every keyword a Quality Score based on three things: the expected click-through rate of your ad, the relevance of your ad to the search, and the experience on the page you send people to. Score higher and you pay less per click. Score lower and you pay more, sometimes significantly more.
This is a double positive. Better structure and more relevant ads mean a higher Quality Score, which means lower cost per click. Lower cost per click means your budget goes further. More budget going further means more conversions at a lower cost per conversion. The whole thing compounds in your favor when it is set up properly, and works against you when it is not.
An advisor with a well-structured account, tight ad groups and relevant landing pages will often outrank a competitor spending twice as much, simply because Google rewards relevance over raw spend.
Speaking of landing pages – they are critical to this whole equation, and the topic deserves more space than one paragraph. We cover it in full in what a landing page has to do in the first five seconds.
What Google Ads for financial advisors actually costs to run
The rule of thumb we use is simple.
You want a daily budget of at least one cost per conversion. If a lead costs you $50, you need $50 a day – roughly $1,500 a month – before the campaign has enough data to learn anything.
That’s per product line/service offering.
So we could be talking about $1,500 a month for first home buyers, $1,500 for investment property, and another $1,500 for refinance.
Same goes across insurance.
Google Ads is really a big maths equation.
Below the baseline spend for your target region, you are not going to be running a successful campaign. You won’t have enough data for Google to analyze.
Most advice firms should plan on $1,500 to $2,500 a month in Google spend to start. Make sure all leads are being tracked from marketing into the pipeline. Then judge performance over a quarter rather than a fortnight against closed deals.
Not cost per click. Not impressions. Not even cost per lead.
Here is what the maths actually looks like at a working budget. Say your daily budget is $100 and your cost per conversion is $50. That is two leads a day, or roughly one every 12 hours. If you close one in five leads to a new client, you are getting a new client every two and a half days.
Now say your cost per conversion is $500 – which is realistic for some insurance products. At $100 a day, you are getting one conversion every five days. Close one in five of those and a new client arrives roughly every 25 days.
That might sound slow. But ask the next question: what is that client worth? If the average client generates more revenue over their lifetime than you spent acquiring them – including the ad spend and any agency fees – then the right move is to increase the budget.
A business that is profitably acquiring clients through paid search and not scaling that spend is leaving growth on the table.
Mortgage work in particular has a settlement lag that sometimes makes anything shorter than three months meaningless as a measurement window.
What to measure instead of cost per lead
Cost per lead is the number every advisor compares across agencies, and it is the number most likely to mislead you. You can get a PDF download ‘lead’ for $5. Is that good?
Probably not if you’re wanting deals and quality conversations.
So tracking your leads and cost per leads is one thing. On the sales side, tracking your connection rates, intro and discovery calls is the next most valuable piece to understand.
We target 2.5 to 3 times return on total investment, and total means our fees plus Google, Meta and Microsoft spend, not ad spend alone. Most agency ROI claims leave their fees out of the denominator, which is worth asking about before you sign anything. Our pricing is published in full on the pricing page.
Two things improve ROI more than bidding ever will. Capture structured lost reasons in whatever CRM sits in front of your advice software, because “already with another broker” and “not ready for six months” are instructions for the marketing campaign to adjust to.
And call the leads properly: three attempts at 1pm, 3pm and 5pm on the same day is one attempt, not three. Spread attempts across a week and the same leads convert better without a cent of extra spend.
If your campaigns are live and none of this sounds like your reporting, start with the common reasons a Google Ads campaign stops working.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a financial advisor spend on Google Ads?
Plan on $1,500 to $2,500 a month to start. The rule is a daily budget of at least one cost per conversion, so a $50 lead needs $50 a day before the campaign has enough data to optimize. Judge results over three months, because mortgage settlement lag makes shorter windows meaningless.
Is Google Ads better than Facebook for financial advisors?
They do different jobs. Google catches people already searching, which is why mortgage leads run $45 to $55 there. Facebook lead forms cost around $24 but convert to conversations at a much lower rate. Run Google for intent, Facebook for reach, and compare them on cost per client rather than cost per lead.
Should advisors use Performance Max?
Usually not at the start. Performance Max spends across every Google surface with limited visibility, and at typical advisor budgets it drifts toward cheap display inventory. Get search campaigns profitable with clean conversion data first. Performance Max works better once the account has enough signal to steer it.
Do I need separate campaigns for different services?
Yes. Wealth planning and retirement planning attract different people at different life stages. A 30-year-old looking to grow their wealth does not want to see retirement messaging – it is not their frame of reference. Separate campaigns with separate ad groups and separate ad copy mean each audience sees something written for them, which improves relevance, Quality Score and conversion rates all at once.
Marketing for mortgage and insurance firms goes well beyond the ad account. If you are working out where Google fits alongside everything else, our guide to digital marketing for mortgage brokers covers the wider picture.
