In this new episode of the FI GROW podcast, Meredith Olmstead and Ida Burr break down what’s changing in digital ads for credit unions and community banks; from seasonality shifts to personal loan trends and the real numbers you need to hit for optimized conversions. Tune in for practical strategies to spend smarter and stay competitive.
Key Takeaways:
Seasonality is Out the Window: Consumer behavior has shifted, follow the data, not the old calendar.
Conversions Drive Optimization: No matter your budget, you need 10–20 conversions per campaign to feed the algorithms.
Use All the Tools: Layer PPC, OTT/CTV, and native ads for more touchpoints; they work together to lower overall costs.
Transcription:
Meredith Olmstead:
Hi, there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales consulting agency and we work exclusively with banks and credit unions. And I am here with our director of digital ads, Ida Burr. Say hi, Ida.
Ida Burr:
Hi, everyone.
Meredith Olmstead:
And Ida and I were just talking about some of the most recent trends that she's seeing with digital advertising for credit unions and community banks. And she has a lot of great insight and it's always very relevant and timely so I was like, "Let's hit record on this. Let's pause and hit record and share this with our audience because I think there's a lot of great takeaways." So the biggest one that kind of overarching on all this whole conversation really is that what we've seen over the last six to 12 months is that typical seasonality, especially for loan products specifically, is completely turned on its head, basically.
It used to be that you would run campaigns seasonally, like, "Okay, we're going to run mortgage campaign in the spring or spring auto loans and then maybe a fall buying season or whatever," these different kinds of seasonal types of products, and you would kind of go in a pattern, but you're seeing now that basically consumer behavior has totally shifted over the last year around these kinds of products. And so it's causing some changes or some needs for some changes in ad strategy for our clients and for other credit unions and banks. So tell us a little bit about that, Ida. What are you seeing and how are you responding to that or recommending that clients respond to those changes in consumer behavior?
Ida Burr:
Yeah, so I mean, really I think the most important thing is to kind of get out of that seasonality mindset because I feel like the interest rates are so high right now that people aren't really planning purchases like this. They're kind of making these purchases when they need to. So their entire journey of I want to buy a new car or I'm going to move, it's being really tied up by these interest rates and not wanting to make those purchases.
Meredith Olmstead:
Gotcha. Yeah, I think one of the things we are telling people is really make sure that all of your ads are set up and optimized for full conversions. So we're forcing all of our clients into full application tracking conversions because pretty much everybody is allowing us to do that now. It used to be a couple years ago you couldn't do that always. So we're optimizing all ads for conversions. And then you've told clients that you should watch the cost per conversion and track how many conversions are coming in and really keep ads running until you see those numbers heading in the wrong direction. So until you see conversions going way down or the cost for conversions going way up, you are safe to let things run their course based on the data and the performance rather than based on seasonality of typical borrowing and lending. So that's very interesting.
I think the one you're seeing that there's really, really big variations you said in auto loans. So in some markets that you're working in, because you work with clients all over the country, and in some markets auto loans are converting to new applications at very low costs, and in other areas they're really, really high. So it's important that you have to keep an eye on how your individual market is performing and not general trends. So if somebody is running their ads or they're working with an agency running their ads and they start to see the cost per conversion going up, what are some of the things they should keep in mind or try to test out?
Ida Burr:
So I always take a look at the insights and just check in on the competitor analysis of how much impression share we have based off of other websites in the area. And then also doing just sweeping through the area and seeing what kind of interest rates, what kind of offers and things like that.
Meredith Olmstead:
We have some clients that are actually matching competitor rate offers in an area, so really because there is just so much rate shopping now because of this high interest rate environment. You also mentioned as we were talking about what are some of these trends, mortgages, that they were less competitive at the beginning of the year. So we were seeing some pretty solid results for conversions for mortgage applications, but now those costs have gone way up. What are you recommending to some clients who may still have some priorities around mortgage for 2025, but they're seeing costs heading up a little earlier than they would've expected in the past?
Ida Burr:
So normally mortgages, we really try to focus on those for the summer. That's normally when people are looking to move around, school's out. It's just an easier time for consumers to move. But I think part of the reason people are holding back right now is, again, the interest rates and the talk of interest rates dropping in the near future. So if you are spending on mortgage, my suggestion would be to tone back the budget a bit right now and kind of follow those updates in terms of when rates are dropping, if they're dropping, and I think the mortgage season is going to be much longer than it normally has been because if rates drop, I could see a huge jump in applications.
Meredith Olmstead:
So almost like pull back a few thousand dollars a month for the next month or two and save it for possibly a stronger mortgage application season in the fall potentially even than in summer, which is when we typically see it. You also said something interesting about personal loans. So that we're seeing across markets that a lot of people seem to be utilizing personal loans for not enormous expenditures but sizable expenditures that they might not have cash on hand easily accessible. And because of these personal loan rates being kind of comparable to even an auto loan or a line of credit, that people are sometimes just getting a personal loan if they have good credit so that they don't have to tie up assets in a loan, like another kind of loan that has some kind of asset to fund that loan.
Ida Burr:
And I mean, the whole point of tying an asset to a loan is for that better interest rate. With a personal loan, there's much less paperwork involved. It's just much easier. And if we're talking about a couple percent between tying up your house's equity versus just taking a loan out for $5,000, people are kind of switching over to personal loans for those kind of needs.
Meredith Olmstead:
We have seen a lot of success with personal loans. I know we're also doing, so besides pay-per-click, so a lot of that is kind of pay-per-click related, you also run YouTube ads for clients, and you were just telling me that it's Google, they still run the YouTube ads and there's been a big shift in the video ads that we run for clients. What are clients having to now do, or what are you having to do for clients in order to keep ads running on YouTube?
Ida Burr:
So the regular video ads that we ran in the past are being retired as of, I believe July 15th is the official date. So I've been slowly moving over all of our campaigns to demand gen ads, and I started with a few even though I know I'm going to be forced into it next month just because I wanted to see what the results would be like, if we would see changes. And actually for most of our clients, we're seeing better results with this demand gen campaign and we get the same amount of control in terms of placements and budgets and things like that.
Meredith Olmstead:
Gotcha. And you're typically running those alongside a pay-per-click campaign. They tend to kind of help with brand awareness, they can possibly promote a special rate of some kind, but those are kind of another way to get in the mix of kind of this OTT, CTV streaming stuff because it's running on YouTube and it also skews way young, right?
Ida Burr:
Yes, absolutely. And it's just another touchpoint, another brand awareness type campaign, but we do see conversions that are linked back to those videos a lot of the time.
Meredith Olmstead:
Nice. So we are also helping clients manage now some digital, like programmatic display and also native ads and then placements on streaming networks, Hulu, all of those different kinds of networks out there, YouTube TV, those kinds of things. What are you seeing, how are those ads comparing these days to pay-per-click or other kinds of social media ads that you're running?
Ida Burr:
So native ads tend to generate conversions at a lower cost. They're still not as low as pay-per-click. I think pay-per-click, you get it right in front of the person as they're searching and they have much higher intent. So these campaigns are more brand awareness and native tends to be cheaper than the OTT. But we have noticed with our clients, if we have OTT and native ads running in the background, the results from pay-per-click tend to go down. So it's-
Meredith Olmstead:
The cost you mean, of those results?
Ida Burr:
Yes, the cost for a conversion goes down. And with OTT as well, we have the ability to track all devices within a household. So even if somebody watches the commercial on their TV, if a device in that household converts, we are able to track it. So it is really cool seeing those actual conversions come through as well.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, it's funny too, when you and I look at those, I love it when we get to see if we stop a campaign, there will still be conversions running from that campaign for two, three, four weeks after the campaign's over because that's a tracked, because probably for that very reason, that you're still tracking to those devices and it's tracked back to those ads that were in that campaign and are still converting even after the ads have actually been shut off. So I guess bottom line, where do people's budgets need to be? We work with smaller budgets a lot of times, but we work with some big budgets too. You manage clients that are spending 50, $60,000 a month and you manage clients that are spending $3,000 a month. So generally, even a big client or a small client, how should they really be, just let's think pay-per-click, how should they be figuring out their budget for pay-per-click?
Ida Burr:
So I mean, I think the best starting point with any campaign in pay-per-click is around $1,500. It depends a lot on the size of the area you're trying to target and what kind of competition. But I would say the minimum you should start with is $1,500. I mean, we have clients that spend $20,000 a month on a campaign, and it just really depends on the competition, the search impressions and things like that. But with that $1,500, you're kind of guaranteeing that you're going to generate enough conversions for that campaign to fully optimize because it needs that conversion data.
Meredith Olmstead:
And so you mentioned to me, and this is where I wanted to make sure we shared with people, for any campaign when you're starting it or if it's been running for a while, for it to continually fully optimize through these ad algorithms, you need to be driving conversions in order for the algorithm to learn who are the people who are converting because that's the people that we want to be showing the ads to. This is AI at work. So you said you need to be generating somewhere between 10 and 20 conversions minimum in the month in order to be able to get the full results. So really if you have an estimate of what each of those conversions is going to cost, so say it's a hundred dollars and you want to generate 20 conversions, you're going to have to spend $2,000 a month to get the conversions needed to make sure that those ads are optimized completely, right?
Ida Burr:
Yes, absolutely.
Meredith Olmstead:
And then if you can hit that budget and you can see, oh, you might have lost some potential budget or market share because you didn't have a big enough budget, or you're just right, or you're maybe spending a little bit too much, you might not actually spend your entire budget. So it can really shift based on data, but definitely in order to really start to see the best results that you can, you have to get those 10 to 20 conversions. Sometimes, I mean, you see conversions that are sometimes 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 40 bucks. Mortgages tend to be higher, 100, 115, but we see personal loans and auto loans that are in the 20, 30, $40 range all the time.
Ida Burr:
Yeah, absolutely. And you get a couple of months of data from that $1,500, then you start digging into the competitor analysis. How much impression share do you have? Are you missing out on results because your budget is too low? And then you can make adjustments from there.
Meredith Olmstead:
Nice. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ida. This is very good tips, lots of actionable insights. I appreciate you sharing it with me. If you're interested in learning more about digital marketing and digital ads for your bank or credit union, please head over to figrow.com and visit us. We have lots of other great podcasts, we have case studies, blogs, all kinds of great information there. So we'd love to have you join our list and come check out our content. And otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.