Brokerage, Investment Firms Among The Most Effective Online Display Advertisers

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A recent report includes some long-sought benchmarking data on the effectiveness of online display advertising by brokerage and investment firms, and the good news is that the ads are among the most successful in the financial services vertical.

MediaMind, a provider of digital advertising solutions, is sharing its analysis of more than 28 billion ads created by the industry in “Financial Services: Making Smart Investments in Online Advertising,” a 25-page research report and mini-poster infographic. You can also watch a 1:19 video summarizing the results. I saw the video on the Investius blog, which keeps an eye on video adoption, in advertising and otherwise, within financial services.

Just three highlights from the research:

  • MediaMind cites a 2010 Kantar Media study that estimates that the global financial services industry spent $2.7 billion overall on online display ads in 2009. Online display is easily the most invested-in channel, representing almost twice what’s spent on newspaper advertising. Brokerage and investment firms represented about 6% of financial services spending on online display ads. That would have totaled $162 million in 2009.

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  • Between Q4 2009 to Q3 2010, more than 50% of global financial services impressions served by MediaMind advertised banking services. But the most effective advertising—in terms of producing responses and driving conversions—were ads by credit card companies. And, as you can see in the graph below, brokerage and investment ads were the second most effective.

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    Now you have benchmarks to use to evaluate the effectiveness of your online advertising. The brokerage/investment average clickthrough rate (CTR) for online display ads: 0.20% and the average conversion rate: 0.063%. Last year, MediaMind reported that the average CTR was about 0.09% and the average conversion rate was .017%.
    As good as it is to see the industry do well in a comparison to other financial services providers and industry in general, these numbers are low enough to keep anyone’s heads from swelling.
  • The findings point to the importance of serving the most impactful ad with the right offer to users the first time. According to MediaMind, online users are about 30% more likely to convert at the first exposure to a financial services ad. If there’s no interest with the first exposure, the likelihood of users acting after additional exposures is significantly reduced.

Be sure to download the full research, which provides lots of detail and insights about driving online ad success.