If you're researching PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising for financial services, you might be wondering:

• How can we make the most of our PPC campaigns?

• What should we do to get the best return?

• What are the most common (and costly) mistakes to avoid?

Most articles online give generic advice like “use good landing pages” or “test your keywords.” That might help if you’re brand new to PPC—but if you’re in financial services, you need something a bit more tailored.

We work with fintech and financial services firms to generate high-quality leads through Google Ads and content marketing. And when we take over ad accounts, we often see the same issues that hold campaigns back.

In this guide, we’re going to walk you through:

• The most common mistakes in PPC campaigns (and how to fix them)

• How to get the most value from Google Ads

• Why pairing PPC with content marketing is often the best long-term strategy

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Common Mistakes to Avoid When Launching a PPC Campaign

1. Targeting too many keywords per ad group

In financial services, PPC is usually aimed at driving qualified leads that need to be assessed before they become clients. That means your keyword strategy should be very focused.

But here’s what we often see: companies running multiple campaigns, each with several ad groups—and each ad group targeting 10+ keywords. This can easily result in hundreds of keywords, even on a modest budget.

If you’re working with £1,500/month or less, spreading it across hundreds of keywords means you won’t get enough data to know what’s working.

We recommend starting small:
👉 1 ad group per campaign
👉 5–8 keywords per ad group
👉 Only 2–3 campaigns for a lower monthly budget

This gives you better visibility over which keywords are converting, so you can optimise accordingly. Focus on fewer, highly relevant keywords—and build from there.

2. Bidding on keywords with low commercial intent

The biggest advantage of Google Ads is the ability to target people who are actively looking to buy—right now. But many financial companies waste their budgets targeting generic or informational search terms.

Example: if you’re offering corporate expense management software, you might be tempted to bid on keywords like “what is corporate expense management” or “types of business credit cards.”

These may attract traffic, but they rarely lead to leads—let alone conversions.

Instead, focus your budget on “money keywords”—search terms that signal purchase intent. Things like:

• “corporate expense software for mid-sized companies”

• “business card solution for finance teams”

• “best expense tracking tool UK”

Save top-of-funnel traffic for content marketing and SEO—PPC should focus on bottom-of-funnel intent to give you the best return.

3. Incorrect or incomplete conversion tracking

This one’s a dealbreaker. If your tracking is wrong, you can’t optimise properly—and you could end up spending thousands on campaigns that aren’t actually working.

Good tracking doesn’t just mean Google Ads sees that a form was filled. You also need to make sure:

• Your CRM shows the correct source of every lead

• You can see which campaign, ad group, and keyword each lead came from

• The leads being tracked are qualified, not just noise

Here are a few issues we often see:

• Conversions are imported from Google Analytics instead of set up directly via Google Tag Manager (GTM), leading to inaccuracies

• HubSpot or another CRM doesn’t capture the original source properly, making it hard to attribute leads

• Tags or triggers in GTM aren’t firing correctly on all forms, so conversions aren’t being tracked consistently

• UTM parameters aren’t being added to ad links, so you lose visibility on where leads are coming from

Before we launch any campaigns for clients, we ensure the tracking setup is airtight—and we monitor CRM quality to ensure we’re not just generating leads, but the right kind of leads.

How to Get the Most Out of Your PPC Budget

Once your tracking is set up and you’ve avoided the major pitfalls, here’s how to start seeing better results.

1. Start small and scale slowly

In lead generation campaigns, quality is more important than volume. You could spend £5,000 a month and get dozens of low-quality leads—or spend £1,000 carefully and bring in the kind of clients you actually want.

That’s why we always recommend starting with a small, controlled budget (e.g. £1,000/month) and scaling only once you see what’s converting.

Here’s a simple bidding progression to follow:

• Start with Maximise Clicks to drive traffic and gather data

• Once you have enough conversions, switch to Maximise Conversions

• When you reach ~50 conversions, test Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) bidding to lower costs while keeping lead quality high

2. Use customer research to guide your keyword strategy

Many agencies just copy what competitors are bidding on. But that often leads to high competition and higher CPCs.

Instead, your keyword strategy should start with your customers.
What are they searching for? What problems are they trying to solve? How do they describe your service?

We like to interview the sales team (or customers themselves) to uncover language and questions that reflect genuine buyer intent.

This approach has helped us uncover high-converting, low-competition keywords that competitors never even considered—because they weren’t paying attention to how customers actually think and search.

A Smarter Strategy: PPC + Content Marketing

We’ve found that pairing PPC with content marketing is one of the most powerful growth strategies in financial services.

Why?

Because you can use PPC to:

• Discover which keywords bring in high-quality leads

• Get quick traffic and data while your SEO builds up

• Drive bottom-of-funnel conversions

Then, use content to:

• Rank for those keywords organically over time

• Build trust and authority

• Support top-of-funnel and mid-funnel lead nurturing

This gives you the best of both worlds: short-term wins and long-term ROI.

Final Thoughts

If you're in financial services, PPC can be one of your most effective marketing tools—but only if it’s done with strategy and precision.

Focus on: ✅ A lean, focused keyword list
✅ Tracking that’s accurate and detailed
✅ Campaigns aimed at high-intent searchers
✅ A plan to scale as you learn what works

At Muscari, we help financial firms launch PPC campaigns that don’t just generate traffic—they generate results. If you’re ready to get more from your Google Ads spend, we’d love to talk.

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