How to Market a Fintech Company with Paid Search
Few marketers understand how to market a fintech company with paid search.
That's a missed opportunity. Fintech companies have a paid search advantage that most don't fully exploit: high LTV products sold to a defined buyer persona.
The unit economics almost always work if you're measuring the right things.
The problem is that most fintech marketing teams either avoid paid search entirely (because CPCs look expensive in isolation) or run it the way a DTC brand would (optimizing for form fills instead of pipeline). Neither approach captures what paid search actually does well for B2B fintech: capturing intent from buyers who are actively evaluating your category.
We ran a paid search program for a B2B fintech platform serving institutional investors and asset managers. They spent $36K/month blended across Google, Bing, and LinkedIn Ads. The result was a 4.75x ROAS and more than $2M in closed-won deals, with a 40% year-over-year improvement in efficiency. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because we connected ad spend to CRM data and optimized for revenue, not clicks.
Here's what we learned.
Why Paid Search Works for Fintech
Fintech advertising is expensive relative to other B2B verticals. But a fintech platform selling to institutional buyers can justify $50–$200 CPCs because a single closed deal might be worth $50K–$500K in annual contract value. The math works even with expensive clicks, provided that you're tracking pipeline and closed revenue back to the keyword level.
This is where most fintech paid search programs fall apart. They report on cost per lead and call it a day. But in a category where sales cycles run 3–6 months and deal values vary by 10x, cost per lead is almost meaningless. A $400 lead that closes a $200K deal is infinitely more valuable than a $30 lead that ghosts after the first call.
With our fintech client, we imported deal-stage data from CRM directly into the ad platforms. That meant we could see which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords were generating actual pipeline, not just form submissions. We shifted budget toward the keywords that produced closed revenue, not the ones that produced the cheapest leads. That's how you get to 4.75x ROAS on $36K/month in spend.
What Makes Fintech PPC Different from Other B2B
Three things make fintech paid search uniquely challenging, which is why generic agencies struggle with it.
Compliance restrictions. Google's financial services advertising policies restrict what you can say and who you can target. Certain product categories, such as crypto, lending, investment advice, face additional verification requirements before you can even run ads. Your ad copy has to clear both Google's automated policy review and your own compliance team, which means the typical "move fast and test everything" approach hits a wall. You need someone who knows which claims trigger disapprovals and how to write compliant copy that still converts.
Niche keyword inventory. Fintech categories are often so specialized that search volume is limited. "Portfolio analytics platform" gets a fraction of the searches that "accounting software" does. You can't throw budget at broad terms and expect volume. You need precise match types, aggressive negative keyword management, and a willingness to bid on long-tail queries that might only get 20–50 searches per month. For our fintech client, some of the highest-value keywords had monthly volumes in the single digits. Those keywords generated six-figure deals.
Competitor brand bidding. Fintech is a category where well-funded competitors routinely bid on each other's brand names. If you're not running brand defense campaigns from day one, you're leaking qualified traffic--people who searched for you specifically--to a competitor's ad. We've seen fintech companies lose 15–20% of their brand clicks to competitors before implementing a defense strategy.
The Impact of AI and LLMs
There's a narrative going around that LLMs are killing paid and organic search. That's half-right (at most).
What's actually happening is mechanical. When an institutional buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about portfolio analytics platforms or compliance software, the LLM isn't answering from memory. It's running searches through Google or Brave in the background, pulling top-ranking pages, and synthesizing the answer. The infrastructure your buyers are using hasn't really changed. They've moved a layer of abstraction, not a layer of plumbing.
The shift that is happening is narrower than "PPC is dying." Informational queries, like "what is portfolio analytics," or "how does treasury management software work," are losing click-through to AI Overviews.
For paid search, this barely matters. We don't bid on those informational keywords anyway. Even when they had higher CTRs before LLMs, they didn't convert enough to justify the cost.
In fact, when we set up paid search accounts, much of the initial onboarding effort is in finding negative keywords to filter out these kinds of queries. In one B2B account we manage, we have over 800 negative keywords to filter out informational search intent.
The queries that drive fintech pipeline--high-intent commercial searches like "[competitor] alternative" or "portfolio analytics platform for asset managers"--are behaving differently. But it's not what you'd expect.
Click-through rates on these terms are up, because the buyers still typing them into Google have already done their early research with an LLM and are searching now to actually evaluate vendors. The traffic is smaller but qualitatively better. That shift favors fintech advertisers who've built their programs around bottom-funnel intent capture rather than top-of-funnel content.
The companies in trouble are those who built their paid and organic search strategies around informational blog content and broad-match top-of-funnel terms.
The fintech firms focused on commercial intent are doing better than ever. Not least because Google has redesigned the SERP to favor sponsored results.
Fintech Marketing Beyond Google Ads
Paid search captures intent, but it doesn't create it. B2B fintech marketing requires reaching the full buying committee, including compliance officers, IT leadership, and the C-suite. You're not closing that committee with a single Google Ads click
This is where LinkedIn ABM becomes the complement to paid search. Google captures anyone from your target accounts who starts searching for your category. LinkedIn lets you target the full buying committee at those same accounts, from the CFO who signs the contract, the compliance lead who has to approve the vendor, to the IT director who evaluates the integration and warm them up before they ever hit Google.
We've run this exact motion for B2B clients: Google Ads for demand capture, LinkedIn for demand generation and committee coverage, with cross-channel remarketing tying the two together. For one client, that coordinated approach generated $1.1M in pipeline from LinkedIn alone, while Google captured the high-intent searches that followed.
This is the approach we take as a PPC for fintech agency. Paid search is the intent capture layer within a broader program that reaches the full buying committee across channels.
About Osric Digital: We're a paid media agency that specializes in fintech, SaaS, and complex services. Our founder Dominick DeJoy previously managed paid media and inbound marketing in-house at the global alternative assets data platform Preqin (now part of BlackRock) before founding Osric Digital in 2021. We've worked with companies like Wall Street Prep, Socialsuite, Synspective, Morningstar, and some of the largest tech companies in the world.