The 2026 PPC budget guide
The financial services landscape is more competitive than ever. Necessity breeds invention, and many brands are exploring new online channels new to them, to strengthen their marketing strategies. Our financial PPC services are often seen as a valuable strategy with quick wins for specific desired outcomes. But with the increased competition, there is a higher need for more strategic finesse; just throwing more money at your ad campaigns does not work, nor is it sustainable.
We’ve put together this guide to help you plan your budgets for 2026. Maybe your company is doing paid digital advertising for the first time, or you want a more sophisticated approach. So we’ll cover everything from the importance of setting accurate goals for your campaign to how to measure success through benchmarking.
This guide outlines a step-by-step budgeting framework tailored specifically to financial service brands.
Set clear goals and intent
Define your goals first. Everything flows out from here.
As you begin to think about your pay-per-click (PPC) strategy, you need to answer the question “what is this being built for?” Do you want to get your name out there with some brand awareness? Maybe you want to drive traffic and be part of the consideration section of the customer journey. Leads and direct applications are key for some businesses where you need to justify your spending with a clear return on investment (ROI).
Or maybe it’s all the above. Maybe it’s a bit of this and a bit of that. If that’s the case, you will need to add weighting to each goal. Then, when you start to allocate budget to each goal, you need to do so by importance of the goal. Setting these out in a marketing strategy, plan, or brief is important. It means that once the ads are up and running, you have something to always look back on.
Define what good looks like
To make your goals matter, you need to do as the title says. Matching metrics to each stage of your funnel means your results have meaning. Although this guide starts to deviate depending on what goals you have so I will try and cover each objective with the type of goals you might be thinking about.
If you’re going for awareness, you’ll want to think about how far and wide you can spread your message, so you’ll be thinking about impressions and CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Basically, how many eyeballs did you get on your message? If Google and Bing are good at anything, it’s at showing your message – but that’s also because it’s easy money for them.
When building awareness campaigns, be careful with your targeting – think logically, even if 98% of the people you’re hitting aren’t in market. At least 2% of those impressions should inspire some measurable behaviour, but that’s another topic.
If that middle of the funnel consideration is more to your taste, people know you, you want them to want you – so you want clicks, measured through CTR (click-through-rates) and landing page engagements. You’ll see much smaller numbers than if you’re going for awareness, but the data you’ll get from these interactions is far more insightful than just impressions.
You can begin to tell if what you have on offer is a good fit for the market. I’ll mention targeting again here, you may see less engagement if your targeting is off, but equally, you could be paying for clicks that aren’t valuable – that’s next.
And finally, if it’s conversions you want – how many leads are you getting? How are you defining a lead? A form conversion? Are they tracked correctly? It’s not just the number of leads you want to think about. It’s the quality. A good quality advert here isn’t just one that piles in leads; it delivers you value for each pound you spend on an advert.
Your budget needs to assume a level of quality, and the maths are based on that. Note these assumptions. If actuals then veer from the budget, you’ll be quicker to diagnose the issues by analysing your assumptions.
Alignment on what good looks like is essential for the continued success of your campaigns. If you don’t figure out what good looks like, you can easily see success in failure.
For example, if you’re going for conversions, the number of people you reach doesn’t tell you that the ad is effective. Yes, a lot of people have seen it, but people aren’t clicking through or responding in the way you’re wanting them to do, so the creative might need to be changed and optimised.
Benchmarking
It’s all well and good for me to suggest setting the right targets for what it is you’re measuring. But where are these numbers going to come from?
There are two sources. Secondary benchmarked data or primary data. The amount of primary data you might have obviously depends on how much PPC you’ve done before.
Regardless of your experience though, I would always recommend looking at how well other businesses in your sector do on aggregate. To find this out there are plenty of places you can get an idea for numbers you want to aim for. Google Ads provide some industry benchmarks and there are loads of whitepapers and agency reports out there.
Take them with a pinch of salt, because each audience is different, and a lot of data out there may not be based on your audience, but it’s a good starting point. Even after working with multiple clients in the same sector, like accounting, we still know there’s an aspect of rapid experimentation and refinement once the campaign launches. Below is a table of the sectors we work in and what the benchmarks are look like:
| Sector | CTR | Conversion rates |
| Insurance | 2.9-5.9% | 8%-15% |
| Building Societies | 2.9%-5.7% | 6% |
| Fintech | 1.9% | 6% |
| Banks | 1.9-2.91% | 5.1-6% |
| Business to Business | 2.41%-5.17% | 0.46% |
| Wealth Management | 2% – 6% | 6% |
| Financial Advisors | 2% – 6% | 3% – 8% |
Media plans and budgeting
How much money this is going to cost you might be the most important thing on your mind. But that doesn’t mean the last couple of sections weren’t important, to do be able to build a good media plan and budget you need to know what your goals are, how you should measure success and what good looks like. It’ll help you secure future budgets if you’re able to convey what good your spend is doing.
To work out what you should be spending, you need to know what your goals are and what benchmark data is telling you. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Our goal: 100 leads per month from ads
Benchmark CPA: £50 a lead
Required minimum budget: 100 x £50 = £5,000
This is purely an example; I’m making the numbers up, but the equations are the same. When you put this into practice, it’s worth noting that you will typically see your results significantly higher than the benchmarked value. This is when your optimising and testing comes into practice.
Chat with us
If you’re struggling with optimising adverts and bringing CPA down – then it’s what we do here at Balance, and if you need support with it – get in touch and we’ll be able to help.
