A poorly-designed website will make it difficult to market your brand online (to put it mildly).
On the other hand, a well-crafted financial website will not only act as a virtual “shop window” for visitors who happen to want to looks at it. Indeed, it will act as a crucial marketing channel for your IFA in and of itself.
That’s why your financial marketing agency should be actively tracking and measuring your website’s metrics, making sure it’s hitting your marketing goals and KPIs.
In other words, it isn’t sufficient to simply build a website and let it then drift away into the virtual ether. It needs to be monitored, nurtured, and steered if your target market is going to see it.
As an experienced financial marketing agency, the team here at MarketingAdviser monitor 4 key metrics for our clients that we recommend you also consider for your own IFA website marketing:
1. Traffic Sources & Traffic
Any financial marketing agency worth its salt will be tracking these metrics. Did your old website hover around 100 visitors a month? If so, are you aiming to increase that total? The answer is most likely yes. If so, then you need to watch your traffic, as well as where it is emanating from.
If your total traffic for each month is showing a continual, downward trend, then something isn’t being done correctly on the marketing front. Remember, the more people you attract to your website, the greater the chance you’ll gain clients through it.
However, you need to also go a step further and analyse where your existing visitors are coming from. Here, digital marketers divide traffic into two main groups: organic and paid traffic. However, the specific sources of your website traffic include:
Search traffic: Visitors who came across your site by clicking on a link that appeared in their search engine results.
Referral traffic: Visitors who arrive at your website via links on other websites.
Direct traffic: When visitors come to your site by directly entering your URL into their browser.
Social traffic: People to visit your site via links on social media.
Paid traffic: People who arrive at your site through paid sources like PPC, CPM, CPC, display ads, and more.
The important thing to do is to analyse which traffic sources are producing the most visits and engagement for your IFA website. It might be, for instance, that you get a lot of good traffic from social media, but not such great results from links in your email campaigns.
Analyse, reflect, and take appropriate action.
2. User engagement
What are your visitors doing when they arrive at your site? Are they leaving just seconds after they arrive at your page? Are they filling out your contact forms, downloading your white papers, or spending more time on particular pages than on others?
Your financial marketing agency should be producing regular reports based on these metrics, identifying areas where your potential clients are getting “stuck” in the online buyer’s journey, and proposing solutions based on sound, analytic data.
3. Bounce Rate
Sometimes a visitor will arrive at your website, and they’ll spend a good 10-15 minutes on investigating your brand. Maybe they even enter their email address into your contact form to receive a free, financial report that’s of interest to them. That would be the sign of an engaged user.
However, not all visitors to your website will engage in this way. Indeed, some will click the “Back” button just moments after they arrive on your web page.
This behaviour is called “Bounce Rate”, and a high bounce rate (e.g. 90% or more) could mean a number of things:
-Your web pages are loading far too slowly.
-Your website is difficult to use and/or contains poor functionality.
-Your website has a bad visual appearance, layout, or simply provides an insufficiently good enough user experience for your visitors to want to stay around.
-Your landing pages aren’t optimised properly to produce meaningful engagement.
-The content of your website is perceived as irrelevant based on what the visitor was originally looking for.
The crucial thing here is to ensure that your content is of a high quality, and provides a cohesive user experience. Your financial marketing agency should be able to offer solid recommendations here, enabling your website to provide the exceptional value your visitors are looking for.
Great financial websites will have a bounce rate somewhere between 25% to 72%, and you should aim to have a bounce rate under 55%.
4. Conversion Rate (CR)
It’s important to have lots of qualified, relevant visitors to your website. However, your website is meant to be a powerful marketing machine, bringing in leads and opening new business opportunities.
In other words, your visitors need to actually be “converting” – that is, taking some kind of meaningful action through your website so they are no longer just “visitors,” but “leads.” This might be downloading a report, filling in your contact form, or booking a spot on one of your webinars.
Your “conversion rate” refers to the percentage of visitors who take this kind of action, and therefore become classified as “leads.” So if you have 500 visitors a month, and 5 of them convert, your conversion rate is:
(5 / 500) x 100 = 1%
A great financial marketing agency will be able to offer meaningful solution which support an increase in your conversion rate, bring your IFA firm new business, clients and revenue via your website.
