Google Ads 101 for Wealth Management Firms · Webinar Replay

Two ways to reach people online

The organic side is everything a prospect can find without you paying for the visit: your brand, your content, your search ranking, and whether the AI assistants mention you. It compounds over time, which is what makes it worth building, but it takes months and sometimes years before it produces anything. Paid can be live tomorrow. Firms need both, and this article covers the paid half because that is the half most firms have never tried.

DO ADS MAKE SENSE · 2 OF 6

Demand creation and capture are both important, but capturing demand is easier than creating it.

Creating demand means convincing someone they need an advisor in the first place, which is slow and expensive work. Capturing demand means being there when they have already decided to look, and that is what Google Ads does: someone types "financial advisor Toronto" and your firm is in front of them. The catch is that those clicks cost more, because every competitor is bidding on the same handful of searches, so most of what follows is about capturing that demand without overpaying for it.

People are searching for you

You don't have to convince anyone they need an advisor. You have to show up when they look.

Wealthtender survey of 500 US households earning over $100,000, July 2025 · Semrush Keyword Overview, Canada database, September 2026.

The first number matters because it applies even to the prospects you think are already won: someone who was handed your name by a friend still looks you up before they call. The second is a single search term in a single city, so the figure for your own market will be different and may well be larger. Either way the searching is already happening, and the only thing in question is whether your firm shows up in it.

Firms are already paying for ads

Nobody keeps paying for ads that do not bring clients. If these firms are in the auction for your city's searches and you are not, those clicks go to them by default.

DO ADS MAKE SENSE · 5 OF 6

The platforms know how to reach your audience

+9.1%

Expected growth in global ad spend in 2026, to $1.30 trillion.

WARC Global Ad Trends, December 2025

Google and Meta have spent years and a great deal of money learning who is in market and when, so once you have described your audience, the platform does the finding for you. Global ad budgets keep rising year after year, which is at least a sign that advertisers are getting their money back.

So, do ads make sense for wealth management?

Ads will not close a $10 million relationship, but they influence your prospects before and when they are in market.

The answer is yes, with one caveat worth holding onto. Nobody hands over $10 million because they saw an ad, and an ad sold on that promise will disappoint. What it does instead is put your firm in front of the right person at a moment that matters, so that when they are ready to choose, you are already on the list.

Are you ready?

Ads send strangers to your website. Before that happens, four things need to exist: proof that other people trust you, a page where a stranger can take a next step, a system that records every lead so that someone follows up, and a number for what a client is worth so you know what a lead can cost. If the second column is a fair description of your firm today, that is the work to do first, and the ads will still be available once it is done.

ARE YOU READY · 2 OF 2

Paid ads are an amplifier. You can't (or shouldn't) amplify a broken funnel or service.

Ads make an offer that works bigger. They don't make a weak offer work.

Whatever you send traffic to gets more exposure, good or bad. Weak reviews, a thin website or slow follow-up all become more visible and more expensive once you are paying for the people who find them. The reverse is also true: an offer that already converts the referrals you get is the kind that tends to hold up when you put more people in front of it.

Three things pick your channel

Answer all three honestly and the channel picks itself.

Google, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit all sell ads, and which one fits depends on where your clients already spend time, what your team can actually produce, and what you can afford to spend. Two things are worth knowing before you choose. The first is that it pays to pick one channel and get good at it before adding a second. The second is that when a firm says a channel did not work for them, the problem is more often the execution than the channel.

What each platform asks of you

The rest of this article is about Google.

Paid social depends on video and images good enough to stop someone scrolling past, and they have to be replaced before they go stale. Paid search needs good ad copy and a landing page that matches what the person searched for. Search clicks cost more, and the people clicking them are closer to a decision. If people are already searching for what you sell, search is where to start, which is why the rest of this article is about Google.

Know your numbers, then work backwards

Target cost per lead = CAC ÷ leads it takes to sign one client.

That is the number you hand the campaign. Everything else is a diagnostic. Optimise for the action closest to revenue: a booked consultation, not a newsletter signup.

A worked example. A client pays $10,000 a year in fees and stays ten years, so the relationship is worth $100,000. Decide what you would pay to win that client, say $10,000. If it takes ten leads to sign one client, a lead is worth $1,000 to you. That is the target you give the campaign. Without it you cannot brief an agency, and you cannot tell Google what to aim for.

Tracking, set up before you launch

Conversion tracking is how Google learns which of the clicks it sent you turned into a booked call, a form or a phone call. Without it, neither you nor Google can tell which part of the spend is doing the work. The technical setup is a longer conversation than this article allows, but the timing is the part to remember: it has to be working before the first ad runs, not after.

Garbage in, garbage out

The goal you give the platform is the thing it optimises for.

Ad platforms run on machine learning, so the goal you set is the thing they get better at producing. Ask for clicks or page visits and you will get plenty of both, from people who had no intention of booking anything. Ask for booked consultations and the platform starts looking for the people likely to book one. Choosing the wrong goal is the most common reason a firm concludes that ads did not work for them.

How much budget do you need to start?

Beyond that, budget shouldn't be the limiter. If your unit economics hold, the only real limit is how many clients you have capacity to take on.

Google learns from volume, which is what both of these numbers are really about. Under $1,000 a month in a single city there is not enough data for it to learn anything useful, and under $5,000 in total there is not enough to judge whether the campaign works. Above that, the budget is set by your cost per lead against your ceiling, and by how many new clients your firm can take on. For context, the average cost per lead in finance and insurance search ads is about $74. LocaliQ, Search Advertising Benchmarks 2026

The three keyword match types

Then read the search terms report every week and add negatives. In a small account, that habit is the optimization.

When you bid on a keyword, Google lets you choose how closely a search has to match it. Exact match shows your ad for that search and close variations of it. Phrase match adds searches that contain its meaning. Broad match can show your ad for anything Google considers related, which is how budgets get spent on searches that were never going to become clients. Google will recommend broad match to you, and it is the one to refuse. Start with exact, add phrase once exact is producing, and leave broad alone. Google Ads Help, keyword matching options

Bid on high-intent keywords

The first group comes from someone choosing a firm right now. The second comes from someone who is still learning, and more and more of those searches never reach a website at all, because Google's AI Overviews answer them on the results page. Paying for the second kind is paying for traffic that was never going to convert, and the same reasoning applies to the content you write for search.

Be local, not broad

A national keyword puts you in an auction with the largest firms in the country, for people you may never be able to serve. A local one has fewer searches, but more of them are real prospects, the clicks cost less, and the competition is one a small firm can win.

Match the intent across the funnel

The search, the keyword, the ad and the landing page all have to say the same thing. If someone searches for a retirement advisor in Toronto and arrives on a general homepage, they leave, because clicking back costs them nothing. Of everything in this article, this is the piece that most often decides whether a campaign converts.

Key factors that decide whether you win the auction

The auction is not won by the highest bid. Google scores each ad on expected click-through rate, how well the ad matches the search, and how useful the landing page is, and a higher score means a better position at a lower price. A more relevant ad with a better page can outrank a competitor paying more per click. Google Ads Help, About Quality Score

Two things to know before you launch

Two practical checks. Google runs a financial services verification programme in a list of countries, where advertisers prove they are authorised by a regulator before financial ads can run. As of September 2026 that list does not include Canada or the United States, but Google can still ask any advertiser to prove who they are, so check before launch. Local Services Ads are a separate product where you pay per lead instead of per click. Financial planning is eligible in the US and not yet in Canada. Both change, so check again before you budget for either. Google Ads Policy, financial services verification by country · Local Services Ads, US · Local Services Ads, Canada

What makes the funnel work

The ad's job ends at the click. From there, three things decide whether the visit becomes a lead. The offer has to be clear and give more than it asks for; a stranger will trade an email for something useful, not a phone call for nothing. The journey has to stay consistent from the search to the page to the follow-up. And the website has to keep making the case the ad started, because the ad has a few words and the page has room.

The ad brings the visit. What happens during and after the visit decides whether it converts.

A form, an email address, a phone number or a booking link can all turn a visit into a lead. Two things matter more than which one you use: how easy the next step is, and how convincing the page is. A page that is hard to use will still convert when the product is in very high demand, but most firms are not in that position and should not plan around it.

The ad, the page and the ask said the same thing

Some of the people who registered for this webinar came from an ad

This webinar is its own example. Part of the audience registered through a LinkedIn ad. The ad spoke to wealth advisors and said what the session was. The landing page said the same thing. The ask was an email address, in exchange for a full session on getting started with ads. The message stayed the same from the ad to the page to the ask, and the trade favoured the visitor. That is why it worked. It is not a sale, but the firms that registered now know who to call when they need help.

Do not let your maybes fall through the cracks

A decision about choosing a wealth manager can easily take a year or longer. Your funnel should be able to handle that.

Most people who become a lead are not ready to buy. In wealth management the decision can take three months or three years. Many firms are built for one call and one answer, and everyone who says "not yet" is lost. Keeping those people warm takes two things: content that is useful to them now with nothing for sale, and a system that remembers who they are and makes them easy to reach when the next touchpoint comes along. This is where most of the value of a campaign is won or lost, and it is the part of the funnel that Paula builds.

Five steps to your first lead from Google

Three details worth adding to the table. Plumbing sometimes includes getting more reviews, because people look a firm up before they convert. The landing page gets one call to action, not several. And a campaign is not a tap you turn on: running it for a week, seeing nothing and stopping is the usual way firms decide that ads do not work.

When do you know a campaign is not working and should be stopped?

Two conditions have to be met before stopping is the right call. The first is that you have spent enough for the result to mean anything, which is the $1,000 a month and $5,000 in total described earlier, and that you have given it two or three weeks rather than a few days. The second is that the cost of each lead, once those leads are in, is still higher than the business can carry.

Even then, it is worth finding out which part is failing before switching anything off. A campaign has four places where it can break: the keyword you bid on, the ad itself, the landing page, and the follow-up after someone enquires. A high cost per lead can come from any of the four, and only one of them is solved by stopping the campaign.

How do you know when you have maxed out your spend?

There are two signals, and they tell you different things.

The first is a Google metric called search impression share. It tells you what share of the searches you were eligible for actually showed your ad, and it splits the share you lost into two causes: budget and rank. If you are losing impressions because of budget, you have not maxed out, and there is demand sitting there that you are not paying to reach.

The second is whether more money still brings more clients. If you raise the spend from $10,000 a month to $30,000 and the number of new clients does not move with it, the extra spend is not buying anything, and that is the point to stop increasing it.

Should a newer firm start with AEO and SEO, or with ads?

Both, if the firm can produce the content that the organic side needs. The order that usually works is to start the ads while the organic work is being built, because ads produce something within weeks and an organic presence takes months.

The two also depend on each other more than they look. The ad buys the first look. What happens next is that the person looks your firm up, increasingly by asking an AI assistant rather than by searching, and what they find is your website and whatever else has been written about you. If that material does not make a good case for your firm, the assistant will not make one either, and the click you paid for is wasted.