Advertising vs campaign metrics in investment management

By adopting campaign metrics, marketers can shift towards measuring real, long-term success

Key takeaways:

• Traditional advertising metrics like CTR and CPC fail to capture the full impact of campaigns in investment management, where the decision-making process is lengthy and involves multiple touchpoints.
• Focusing solely on immediate results from advertising metrics can misguide strategy. Investment management marketing requires tracking metrics that reflect long-term engagement, brand trust, and relationship-building.
• With privacy regulations increasing and cookie-based tracking diminishing, investment management marketers need to move away from advertising metrics and adopt comprehensive campaign metrics to measure real, long-term success.

From click-through rates (CTR) to cost per click (CPC), advertising metrics are widely used to gauge the performance of marketing campaigns. While these metrics provide a snapshot of immediate engagement, they fail to offer a complete view of a campaign’s true success – especially in the complex, intermediated world of investment management.

Relying solely on advertising metrics may work for other industries where quick conversions are the goal, but for investment management marketers, the stakes are higher, and the journey from awareness to action is far more nuanced. Here’s why advertising metrics fall short and why a different approach to campaign measurement is necessary.

How do advertising metrics limit understanding of campaign success?

Advertising metrics offer a limited, short-term view of campaign performance. They measure how many people viewed or clicked on an ad or went on to perform an action, but they fail to provide any insights into what happens after that initial interaction. For investment management firms, the sales cycle can be lengthy, and the decision-making process involves multiple touchpoints across various channels, making it essential to track more than just ad engagement.

Marketers who only rely on advertising metrics are missing critical data about how their campaigns are contributing to long-term brand awareness and loyalty, relationship-building, and ultimately, conversions. Advertising metrics are transactional, focusing on immediate outputs rather than on the full customer journey and lifetime value.

What makes the sales process in investment management unique

Unlike direct-to-consumer industries, investment management involves a highly intermediated sales process. Fund managers, analysts, and institutional investors rarely make quick decisions based on a single ad. Their decisions are usually influenced through research, peer comparisons, long-term market performance, and regulatory considerations.

This makes it increasingly difficult to attribute sales or client engagement directly to specific ads. Advertising metrics don’t account for the broader, multi-touchpoint nature of investment management marketing, where prospects engage with a variety of content, including whitepapers, webinars, and long-term brand messaging.

Using advertising metrics alone results in a disconnected view of the campaign’s effectiveness, leaving marketers with an incomplete understanding of how their marketing efforts impact the business.

Why is a focus on immediate results problematic?

Advertising metrics encourage a short-sighted, immediate focus, which can easily misguide strategic decisions. Marketers often fall into the trap of chasing clicks or impressions rather than focusing on the overall impact of their campaigns. This leads to inefficient allocation of resources – spending more on channels that yield higher CTRs but don’t necessarily drive meaningful engagement or conversions.

In investment management, where brand trust, expertise, and long-term relationships are key drivers of success, short-term advertising metrics provide little value.

Marketers need to shift their focus from immediate outcomes to metrics that capture the broader context of how their campaigns are influencing investor behaviour over time.

What challenges do privacy regulations present to marketers?

Growing focus on privacy and the regulation of personal data is creating further challenges for marketers. With third-party cookies becoming obsolete and data tracking becoming more restricted, the accuracy of advertising metrics is declining.

According to our research, cookie-based tracking is being blocked in up to 80% of visits in Europe, meaning that advertising metrics are increasingly based on incomplete data sets. This is a significant problem as the reliance on incomplete or inaccurate data to measure campaign success leads to skewed datasets and wasted media spend.

As privacy regulations continue to tighten, marketers will need to rely less on advertising metrics and more on metrics that account for these challenges while still delivering a clear picture of campaign performance.

At Alphix Solutions, we believe these specific challenges need a shift away from advertising metrics towards a measurement framework that works – campaign metrics. Unlike advertising metrics, which focus on immediate, channel-specific results, campaign metrics consider the long-term effectiveness of an entire campaign, from the first point of engagement to the final conversion.

Why are campaign metrics essential in investment management marketing?

Campaign metrics such as the campaign effectiveness ratio (CER) and impact on market position value (IPV) provide a clearer picture of how a campaign is contributing to business objectives. They offer insights into how marketing efforts are building trust, educating prospects, and driving investment decisions over time.

For investment management marketers, this is critical. Measuring success based on campaign metrics allows you to align your marketing strategy with your business goals, ensuring that your efforts are driving long-term value rather than just short-term engagement.

By adopting this approach and focusing on campaign metrics, investment management marketers can gain deeper insights into how their efforts contribute to long-term success. This shift not only helps optimise marketing strategies but also ensures that campaigns are driving real, measurable outcomes aligned with business objectives.

Want to learn more about how to effectively measure your marketing campaigns? Download our whitepaper, Advertising Metrics vs Campaign Metrics in Investment Management, and discover how Alphix Solutions is leading the way in redefining campaign success. Download the whitepaper now