In this episode of the Hit Record Podcast, Meredith Olmstead and FI GROW's Digital Ads Director, Ida Burr dive into how banks and credit unions can make smarter digital ad decisions heading into 2026. From rising competition to AI placements and budget strategy, this episode is packed with quick tips to help you get more from your marketing dollars.
Key Takeaways:
Conversion Volume Matters: Campaigns need at least 20 conversions every 30 days to fully optimize and reduce cost-per-acquisition.
Budget Gaps Cost You Clicks: Use the "Impression Lost to Budget" metric in Google Ads to spot where you’re missing potential traffic.
AI Max = More Visibility: Enabling AI Max can improve placement near AI-generated summaries without compromising compliance.
Transcription:
Meredith Olmstead:
Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales and service consulting agency. We work exclusively with banks and credit unions. And I am here with our digital ads director, Ida Burr. Say Hi, Ida.
Ida Burr:
Hey, everyone.
Meredith Olmstead:
So Ida and I were just talking, we've actually been meeting with all of our clients over the last month and a half or so. We are in the fall of 2025 and we've been meeting with all of our clients proactively to work on budgets for the coming year 2026. And Ida's been giving all of our clients a lot of really great strategy ideas. And I was like, "Ida, I think we ought to hit pause and hit record on this. I think we should talk to people about some of the strategy and some of the ideas you've been sharing because I bet a lot of people who are listening to our podcast and read our blog might find some of this really interesting." So I just wanted to touch base with you and talk about some of the trends that you're seeing at the end of the year 2025 and going into 2026 when it comes to digital ads.
I know there's a lot going on with budgets and with recommending how to know when to increase your budgets or when to keep things around the same, and also everything going on with AI. So the first thing we've been talking a lot about is costs. And when we're talking to clients and when you're talking with them about their budgets, everybody's always really budget conscious. There's a lot of crazy stuff going on with the economy these days. So what's going on with costs and knowing when you need to raise your budgets and how do you know when you're spending enough or when you're not spending enough and how to plan for your budgets going into a new year?
Ida Burr:
So I meet with my Google rep every other week and he's really great at giving me insight into campaigns and how they're performing and how to get costs down. And one of the things that he really pushes is having campaigns that generate at least 20 conversions within a 30-day time period. That just allows Google to collect enough information about what those people converting look like, and it gives them an opportunity to create a bigger audience of those potential people. So just looking at those results, if you're not generating that amount of conversions, it's never going to really fully optimize and be able to get in front of the most high quality traffic.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, and I think that's funny. So a lot of times when we start working with clients, they'll be like, okay. So we'll go into their ad account and they're not optimizing for conversions. They'll be optimizing for impressions or optimizing for clicks or landing page views or whatever it might be. So we end up having to shift their entire strategy and all of their campaigns basically have to be rebuilt because we optimize everything that they're doing basically solely for completed applications. So that's really the first thing. And so that's the first thing that ends up happening is people are like, oh. And so then you have to take a step back.
The first thing is that they have to basically rework, a lot of times people will have to rework their entire approach to their ad campaigns because they haven't been optimizing for conversions in the first place, really, because their idea of a conversion might've been a start application or a click or whatever that might have been. And so they may have never been optimizing for a completed application. So all of their ad campaigns in the past have never had enough conversions. So that can be a weird shift and that can be a reason why you could be looking at somebody's performance, ad performance over the last few years and they've not been spending anywhere near enough money going into when you're looking at their budget's coming ahead. Okay.
Ida Burr:
Yeah. And that's an important point too, is to make sure that the conversion you're actually tracking is that completed application. Because like you said, a lot of times people are just, they're optimizing for clicks or view throughs or even sometimes we see phone calls are included in those conversions. So making sure you know exactly the conversion you want and only optimizing for that specific one.
Meredith Olmstead:
And look, it's fine. If you want to optimize for traffic into a branch, that's fine. You can build different campaigns for different purposes, just make sure that you're very strategic about those and that you break them out into different campaigns with their own specific budget. You don't want to mix and match those kinds of metrics and then it muddles your results, and then that takes, that pulls away budget from something else that would be optimized for something different. So that's really important for sure.
Now the other metric too that you want to make sure that people are looking at when they're deciding if they need to increase. So say you have your budgets running and they're optimized for conversions for completed applications, and we're getting towards the end of the year, so that's all set up and they've been running and they're getting the right number of conversions. How can they tell there's that one... I love that one metric about whether or not they're under-spending. So remind everybody, what's that one metric that you can look at in Google, at least pay-per-click to know if you're under-spending on a particular product line.
Ida Burr:
So if you go into manage the columns when you're in the dashboard, you can pull up, it's called impression is lost because of budget, and this gives you a percentage of times that your ad did not show up because your campaign ran out of budget for the day. So that is a really useful metric as well when looking through your campaigns and figuring out where you can add money.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. And so it's a daily budget, so sometimes it'll be like 11% or 12% or 20%. And so then you back that out and figure, okay, if on a daily basis I'm missing out on 17% of the average search in this area, then you back that out, do the math on it, and then you can increase your spend by approximately 17 or 20-ish percent over the course of the entire month, and theoretically you'd be showing up in relevant searches 20% more and getting some additional results. So that would be approximately the amount of search or the amount of budget that you would want to increase your spend on in that scenario.
Okay, perfect. So the other trend that everybody, of course, is always talking about is AI. So there's something else that you've been testing for our clients in terms of AI optimization just in the Google Ads space right now. Tell us about that.
Ida Burr:
Yes. So they have this new option in the campaign settings, you could turn on AI Max. I've been turning this on and kind of keeping a close eye on it. Within that setting, you can allow it to create text for your ad and also change the landing page. I have not been using those settings just because with financial institutions we want to be careful about the language we're using and what page people are clicking through to because we want proper disclosures, and it's just a little more complicated there. But this setting does allow your ad to show up very closely around those AI summary results.
Meredith Olmstead:
Gotcha.
Ida Burr:
And so if you had the text customization on it would be able to pull it into that summary, but then it would make up the text that is linked to your landing page.
Meredith Olmstead:
So the AI Max basically could place some of your AIs or could place some of your ad texts alongside those Google AI summaries at the top of the page. But it's not going to change the text at all, but it will put them in that space, if you will, with that link to almost look like it's part of those AI generated summaries at the top, but it's placed there with a link that's replicating that placement but not necessarily changing the language so that it would still stay compliant, if you will. Okay, perfect.
Ida Burr:
Yes, absolutely.
Meredith Olmstead:
That's cool. And what are you seeing from those placements?
Ida Burr:
Yeah. Overall, it's hard to see the breakdown of where exactly the ad clicks and things come from, but the costs have been going down slightly for some clients when I turn this on and we do get a little bit more impressions share. So I think that they are helping us become more relevant and showing up in those AI results.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, that's good. It's another placement option, so that's nice to hear that. Obviously, Google's not going to just check out of AI result summaries. You know what I mean? They're obviously very incentivized to make sure that their ad spend or that ad spend is still getting those placements and they're not going to get pushed down to the bottom of the page. So that makes sense.
Last thing we were talking about is, we've been talking a lot about this, especially in some bigger markets, huge increases in spending by some national lenders and national banks. So we're seeing big guys, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, some really large spikes in spending this fall. What are you telling folks about what to do? Obviously, when we get to the holidays, we do see some smaller and regional banks sometimes do ratchet back spending depending on their strategies and their budget's still available. But we are seeing some pretty high spikes in spending and impression shares going up for some really big national players in the market. And so what are you recommending with clients at this point?
Ida Burr:
Yeah. So I have been keeping a close eye on it and it's kind of across the board. Every time I log in and look at the insights, it's like Chase increase their impression share by 10% this month and results are going down. So what I would recommend, if you notice this, is either you cut back your spend just so you're not wasting your budget on... Because what happens when the competition increases is Google will still show your ad, but instead of being at the top of the page, you're five results down. So you're still paying for that placement, but it's not as prominent as it should be.
So either cutting back your budget a little bit for the rest of the year, just ride out the competition spikes, or if you do have budget, increasing that budget so you can start showing up at the top of results again. Either way it is rough because coming up with double the budget to compete with these big banks is hard. And then losing out on results because you don't have enough budget hard. But I think it makes sense if you don't have the budget not to waste a bunch of ad money on those placements.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, gotcha. All right, good. Well, thank you so much, Ida. We really appreciate the insight. It's timely and it's good to be able to share in a timely manner. So we'll get this up and posted hopefully in the next couple of weeks so people can benefit from it. So we appreciate you. Thanks so much.
And if you all want to learn more about digital ads for your bank or credit union, please come on over to figrow.com and visit us. Lots of other podcasts and blogs and case studies. We'd love to see you. Otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.