Funnel Metrics That Make Sense For Financial Services Marketers

Financial services marketing is complicated by audience journeys that follow many different paths. By segmenting this journey into different funnel stages, finance marketers can better prioritize how they address each audience’s needs and optimize their strategies for maximum ROI. In this guide, we'll look at the key metrics for each funnel stage and provide actionable strategies for testing, benchmarking, and measuring success.

The top of the funnel is all about creating awareness. It's the first touchpoint where potential customers get to know your brand. The financial services industry is a crowded one, so keep a close eye on how well your brand is differentiating in the market. Metrics like brand search volume, direct website traffic (indicative of brand recall), and interactions with unique value proposition elements on the site will help you gauge your appeal versus your competitors.

If your company deals with international clientele, you can see how well your website is adapting to global markets in metrics like geographical distribution of website visitors, language preferences, and interactions with region-specific content. These are the other metrics that matter most at this stage:

Traffic sources

Knowing where your audience is coming from helps tailor your content and ads. Are they finding you through organic search, paid ads, or social media?

Engaged sessions

This tells you the percentage of visitors who become a conversion, spend more than 10 seconds on your website, or view multiple screens or pages. If visitors to your website aren’t doing any of these things, it could signal search engines that your landing page isn't resonating with visitors.

Page views per session

This metric gauges the average number of pages a visitor browses during a single visit. More page views can indicate higher interest and engagement.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) on ads

A reflection of your ad's effectiveness. A high CTR means your ad is compelling enough to prompt clicks.

Mobile vs. desktop traffic

With the rise of mobile browsing, understanding the device preference of your audience is very important, especially if you are targeting younger or international audiences, or you have an app you would like your customers to adopt.

These high-level metrics are a good start to tracking how well your top-of-funnel strategy is doing at attracting audiences that can potentially become clients or customers. This isn’t everything, but each of these elements is important if you want accurate information that you can then turn into action items for your marketing teams.

• Testing: Use A/B testing to experiment with different ad creatives or landing page designs. Which version captures more attention?

• Benchmarking: How do your metrics stack up against industry averages or competitors? Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs can offer insights.

• Measuring success: Monitor metrics over time. A growing organic traffic or an improving CTR is a sign you're on the right track.

As potential customers move down the funnel, they're evaluating if your services align with their needs.

If you are concerned about integration with legacy systems, keep an eye on error rates, page load times (especially if legacy systems affect website performance), and user feedback related to site functionality.

Building audience confidence in your brand is also important at this stage, so watch how quickly people leave your site, as a high bounce rate might indicate a lack of trust. Time spent on testimonial and review sections, and interactions with trust badges or security certifications, are also metrics that can indicate how comfortable a visitor might be turning to your website for financial advice or to understand complex financial products and services.

You can also use these same metrics applied to your educational content, like white papers or long form articles, to monitor how well your site explains your service or products, so visitors that need education on these complicated financial matters are getting what they need to take confident next steps.

Data privacy and regulatory compliance is more important than ever, and that can be tracked by monitoring page views and interactions on legal and compliance-related pages, click-through rates on mandatory disclosures, and user consent rates on data collection prompts. Here's the rest of the list for this stage:

Average session duration

A longer duration can suggest that visitors are finding your content valuable and engaging.

Lead generation and conversion rate

Are visitors taking desired actions, like signing up for a newsletter or requesting more info?

Customer segmentation

Which segments are most engaged? Tailoring content to specific segments can boost engagement.

Path analysis

This provides insights into the typical journey users take through your site, highlighting potential bottlenecks.

Exit pages

If users frequently leave from a specific page, it might be worth investigating why.

Your middle-of-funnel metrics should show you whether or not your messaging is on target and resonating with audiences. Are they taking the actions you want them to take? Are you helping them understand financial terms and processes that can often be complicated? Are they converting? These are the strategies we recommend finance businesses use to test, benchmark, and measure success for this middle stage of the buyer journey.

• Testing: Play around with content formats. Maybe your audience prefers videos over articles? Test different CTAs to see which ones convert best.

• Benchmarking: Analyze user behavior. Where do potential customers drop off? How does your conversion rate compare to financial industry standards?

• Measuring success: An increase in session duration or conversion rates is a positive sign. Tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can provide these insights.

This is the home stretch. Potential customers or clients are ready to make a decision. Monitor immediate conversion rates vs. repeat visits and interactions with short-term promotional content vs. brand-building content to get a sense of short-term vs. long-term strategy health. And if leadership needs to know how you can handle budget constraints, look to cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), and overall website ROI to tell the story. Here are the metrics that can make or break the deal here:

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? It's essential to ensure this is lower than the customer's lifetime value.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

An estimate of the total revenue from a single customer. It's a key metric to determine marketing spend.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A high NPS indicates satisfied customers who are likely to recommend your services to others.

ROI of marketing campaigns

Which campaigns are giving the best bang for your buck?

Use this strategy to help your finance website convert traffic to business

Though all the stages are important, the conversion stage is where you show that your marketing strategy works. Don’t forget to look back at some big picture items, not just final conversions, to get a complete sense of how well visitors grasp how your financial services or products benefit them. You can check common focal points like cross-channel consistency through your multi-channel attribution, user flow across different channels, and conversion rates from various touch points. Here’s the testing, benchmarking and measuring success strategy for this final phase:

• Testing: Experiment with pricing strategies or incentives. What maximizes conversions?

• Benchmarking: Compare your CPA and CLV with industry averages. Are you getting a good return on your marketing spend?

• Measuring Success: Track metrics over time. An increasing CLV or positive feedback indicates you're doing something right.

Our data-driven approach to digital marketing is a natural fit for the numbers-based world of finance and fintech. We like to focus on numbers as evidence of what’s working, and as a roadmap for where we need to make changes to see positive results. If you focus on these metrics in your financial services marketing, you can get a better understanding of your customer’s journey, from awareness to decision. You can then optimize your strategies at each stage, delivering value and achieving a solid ROI. You’ll get better results by developing an understanding of what your data tells you and acting on those insights.

If you would like some help assessing your marketing program, get in touch with us today. We specialize in building custom digital marketing plans and strategies that help businesses and organizations achieve maximum ROI.