Hands up if you’ve been in this meeting: You’ve got board wanting to know what the budget they gave you actually did for the bottom line, and they want a clean number to look at. But we have way more than just one metric to go by because there are so many different routes to a conversion.
We might get someone researching a mortgage, a pension or a business insurance policy for months before they act, and the pounds spent can’t easily reflect that customer journey. They might touch a dozen channels on the way – each may be important, but it makes it hard to attribute each of them. Then, by the time they convert, the trail has gone cold, and the credit is getting contested.
That gap, between what the board wants and what the data can tell them, is where good measurement in your marketing activity earns its place. Done well, it does more than justify last quarters spend; it also shows you what your next move is
We’re running a webinar at the start of September with Infinity, where we’re getting into the fundamentals of marketing measurement and how to approach it properly. If you read this blog, and want to know more, make sure you sign up here.
Why measuring marketing ROI in finance is really hard
We should all be aware that most financial products are “considered” purchases. Our customers weigh up a pension, a mortgage or a commercial insurance policy. Some might spend months comparing options, reading reviews and asking for advice before they commit. Some might not, the customer journey in our sector is messy.
The activity we put into building trust complicates it further. In a regulated sector where people are cautious with their money, the brand work that builds confidence often does the heavy lifting long before a lead form ever appears, and that influence is hard to pin to a single campaign or activity.
The buying cycle isn’t exactly uniform either. A high-street bank chasing current-account switchers, an IFA nurturing retirement clients, and a B2B fintech selling to finance teams are all measuring very different things. There’s no single template that fits every finance brand; we’re all different, which is both wonderful and what makes this a difficult topic to cover. Teams really need to be strategically minded enough for a real, considered approach. However, here are some of my thoughts on how you get started.
What better measurement looks like in practice
Stronger marketing measurement for financial services comes from a few habits applied consistently.
Measure the whole funnel
Digital marketing made the bottom of the funnel easy to count. Clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition and ROAS all sit there, ready to be reported, so that’s where budget and attention tend to pile up. The problem is that in finance the decision is made much earlier, during the long stretch of research and reassurance that a last click model never sees.
Over-investing in the measurable end while neglecting the top is how performance channels end up underperforming, because you’ll stop feeding them.
So the advice: give the upper funnel real metrics too. Things like Share of search, brand search volume and reach show whether you’re building the familiarity that a cautious buyer needs, while retention measures like customer lifetime value and churn tell you whether the relationship held.
For a B2B wealth management and financial advisers brand nurturing clients over years, those later-stage numbers often matter more than any single paid media campaign report.
No single method has all the answers
Attribution modelling is the most accessible, but it leans on last-click logic and is losing accuracy as tracking data thins out.
Controlled experiments and geo-testing are more reliable because they isolate cause, though they take real effort to run properly.
Media-mix modelling is the most holistic and holds up well without individual-level data, which makes it increasingly attractive in a privacy-first, heavily regulated sector, but it needs years of history and specialist support.
So, what do you do?
You try and triangulate. When two methods agree, you can act with a degree of confidence. When they disagree, you’ve found a measurement gap worth investigating, not a campaign that failed. You don’t really need all three running at once to start (it’s expensive, resource-heavy, and slow); comparing your analytics platform against a single test-and-learn result is a perfectly good beginning.
Expect directional confidence, not certainty
Measuring factory output is deterministic; marketing activity is not. The moment human behaviour and competing products enter the picture, you’re in probabilistic territory, and no dashboard changes that. There is almost no such thing as perfect attribution. So, you can do all the triangulation and mixing you like; you need to know that this isn’t a perfect science.
My favourite sentence here, especially when speaking to non-marketers, is “is it reasonable to assume that”… of a hundred citations on ChatGPT might cause 1 or 2 to check us out? That 10,000 people seeing our LinkedIn ad might cause a few dozen to look at our site? That a long dwell time on content means at least some of those people will be influenced by it? If it’s a reasonable assumption, even better a conservative one, you’re making a start towards real common-sense marketing.
That matters most when you’re standing in front of a board that wants a single, certain figure. Promising precision you can’t deliver erodes trust the first time reality disagrees. So, be clear with your leadership, offer a clear, honest read on the likely direction of travel; it builds trust.
Accepting that measurement is probabilistic is the mindset that separates mature financial services marketing from wishful thinking.
Question everything
With all this in mind, it’s also worth remembering that every metric arrives with a point of view attached to it. Always take the numbers that are presented with a pinch of salt ask who produced it and what they gain if it looks good.
The platforms. Meta and Google both attribute conversions using their own self-reported data, and each tends to claim more credit than it’s really owed. Run both and you’ll sometimes see the same conversion counted twice, once on each platform. Treat platform-reported ROAS as directional, then cross-check it against a third-party tool or a controlled test.
Media owners. Research showing that a given channel works is often funded by the businesses that sell that channel. The findings may well be sound, but they need context, because there’s a commercial interest in the answer.
Agencies. An SEO specialist will tend to frame organic growth as the thing that matters most; a paid team will point you to ROAS. Both can be right, but both are reading from their own script, which is exactly why an honest measurement approach questions its own suppliers as readily as anyone else’s.
Your own team. Confirmation bias is real, and it bites hardest when the alternative means admitting a budget decision didn’t work. It shows up in the metrics people choose to celebrate. Total impressions, raw follower counts and email open rates flatter a report without proving much.
In-demo reach, engagement rate and click-to-open rate are harder won and far more honest about whether the work is landing.
Measurement is a discipline, not a dashboard
Something your board will be pleased to here is that none of this depends on buying the most sophisticated tool on the market. Proper marketing measurement for financial services comes from a handful of habits held steadily over time:
- Expect direction rather than certainty
- Measure the full journey instead of just its cheapest stretch
- Triangulate your methods
- Question where every number comes from, your own included
Do that consistently and measurement stops being the quarterly scramble to justify spend. It becomes the thing that tells you where to move next, which is the whole point. The trend over time will always teach you more than any single number in isolation.
If you’d like to go deeper on any of this, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing at our upcoming session with Infinity. We’ll cover the fundamentals of measurement and how to apply them properly to financial services, with plenty of room for the questions your own reporting throws up. Sign up for the event here to reserve your place.
