Three Campaign Types. One Right Order.
Before you argue about budget, understand what each campaign type actually does.
- Search Ads
Text ads that appear when someone types a query into Google — right at the moment they’re actively looking for what you offer.
- Best for: Capturing people already searching for a financial advisor in your market
- Run it when: Day 1. Always. This is your foundation campaign — nothing comes before it.
- Display Ads
Visual banner ads that appear across millions of websites, YouTube, and apps — reaching people who weren’t searching for you at all.
- Best for: Building brand awareness and feeding the top of your funnel
- Run it when: 60–90 days in, once you have real conversion data to guide audience signals.
- Remarketing
Ads that follow your website visitors around the web — and across platforms — reminding warm prospects that they looked at your site and didn’t reach out yet. Your remarketing audience isn’t limited to Google. Those same visitors can see your ads on Facebook, Instagram, and other channels too.
- Best for: Re-engaging people who visited your site but didn't fill out a form or call — across every platform they use
- Run it when: Day 1 alongside search if you already have organic or referral traffic. Otherwise, 30 days in once search has built your audience.
Most Advisors Get This Backwards
Here’s the story that happens constantly. An agency pitches a display campaign because the numbers look impressive — massive reach, low CPM, thousands of impressions. It sounds like you’re everywhere. The advisor spends $1,500. Gets zero calls. Concludes that Google Ads doesn’t work for financial advisors.
Google Ads worked fine. The sequence was wrong.
Display is a brand awareness tool. It’s built to reach people who weren’t looking for you. If those same people have no search campaign to catch them when they finally do search — and no remarketing to follow up — you’ve spent money on visibility with no mechanism to convert it.
The problem isn’t the channel. It’s the order.
99% of Your Website Visitors Are Gone Forever (Unless You Do This)
Here’s the number that should change how you think about paid media. It’s not a click-through rate or a cost per lead. It’s this:
- The Bounce Reality
99% or more of your website visitors leave without ever contacting you.
You never hear from them. They came, they looked, and they left. Without a remarketing system in place, they’re gone forever — and you never knew they were there.
For most industries, this is painful but manageable. People buy shoes on impulse. But financial advisors operate on a long sales cycle. Someone searching for a retirement planner in March might not be ready to hire until July. They’re evaluating. They’re comparing. They’re thinking it over.
That’s not a problem — it’s an opportunity, if you’re set up to capitalize on it. The tragedy isn’t that 99% of visitors leave. The tragedy is when they leave and you have no way to get back in front of them.
Remarketing is the mechanism that solves this. For the next 90–180 days after someone visits your site, your ads follow them wherever they go online — Google, YouTube, Gmail, display networks, and even Facebook and Instagram. The cost is minimal. The click is cheap. And the person seeing the ad already knows who you are.
The first visit is rarely the conversion. Remarketing turns “not yet” into “yes.”
Search + Remarketing: Launch Them Together
Search ads are demand capture. Someone typed “financial advisor near me” or “RIA for business owners.” They told Google exactly what they want. Your ad shows up. They click. That’s as warm as it gets in paid media.
Display is demand generation. You’re placing an ad in front of someone who was reading a sports article and had no intention of thinking about their retirement today. You’re interrupting them — which isn’t bad, but it’s expensive and it’s slow.
On a $2,000–$5,000/month budget, you don’t have enough money to generate demand and capture it simultaneously. You have to choose. Capture first. Generate later. That’s the foundation of every Google Ads campaign for financial advisors we build.
But here’s the nuance the old “search first” rule misses: most advisors already have traffic. Organic search, referrals, maybe some social. Those visitors are landing on your site right now — and bouncing at 99%+ without a remarketing system in place. Every day you wait to launch remarketing, you’re losing a warm audience you already earned.
For an established practice with existing web traffic, the right answer isn’t “search now, remarketing in 30 days.” It’s search and remarketing together on Day 1. The cost to add remarketing is minimal — $0.50–$1.50 CPC on display remarketing — and the upside is immediate. You stop bleeding warm visitors the moment you flip it on.
Search + Remarketing — Launch Together
Search captures new demand from people actively searching. Remarketing captures the 99% who visit from organic, referral, or search and leave without converting. Run both from Day 1. Exact-match and phrase-match keywords. Local targeting. Dedicated landing page built to convert, not impress. Remarketing follows those visitors across Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and display — for the next 90–180 days.
Performance Max — 60–90 Days In
Once your search campaigns have generated strong conversion signals, Performance Max becomes powerful. It uses those signals to find more of the right people across Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, and display — all from one campaign. Without strong data, PMax optimizes for the wrong things and burns budget fast. With it, it’s one of the most effective tools in the stack.
But here’s the part most agencies skip: not all conversion signals are equal. For e-commerce, the signal is hard to fake — someone has to swipe a credit card to buy a T-shirt. Google knows that’s real intent. For financial advisors, it’s more complicated. A form submission to download a free guide? Bots fill those out. A 30-second session? Meaningless. PMax will happily optimize for whatever signal you give it — so if the signal is weak, you get massive volumes of junk traffic that looks great in a dashboard and produces zero real clients.
This is why we wait until a practice is mature enough to feed PMax strong signals: a booked intro call, a new client hired, an actual scheduled meeting. Those conversions are hard to fake, high intent, and exactly what PMax needs to go find more of the right people. A firm that’s been running for six months with solid search data and real conversion events will outperform a brand-new account running PMax from day one — every time.
Cold start vs. established practice: If you have zero existing website traffic, build search first for 30 days to generate a remarketing audience — you need site visitors before remarketing has anyone to follow. If you already have organic or referral traffic — and most advisors do — start remarketing on Day 1. You’re already losing warm visitors every day without it.
What Happens When You Skip the Sequence
Running display before search is like putting a billboard on a road that doesn’t lead to your office. People see you. Maybe they remember you. But when they’re ready to act, there’s no search campaign waiting to catch them. The awareness evaporates.
Running search without remarketing is the subtler mistake — and it’s just as costly. Every visitor who bounces without converting is a warm prospect walking out your door. With 99% of visitors leaving without contacting you, and a sales cycle that can stretch 90–180 days, you need a system that keeps getting back in front of them. Skipping remarketing means you’re paying for that first visit and getting nothing out of it.
Agencies that pitch display first usually do it for one reason: the reach numbers look impressive on a report. A lot of impressions at a low CPM makes the month-one recap look good. It doesn’t make your phone ring. The EVANCED Marketing Platform tracks what actually matters — qualified leads, cost per lead, and revenue pipeline, not impressions.
"99% of the people who visit your website are going to leave without calling you. Remarketing is the only system that gives you a second shot."
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let’s run the math on a $2,200/month budget — a real number for a solo advisor or small RIA getting started with paid media.
From Day 1: $1,760 on search. You’re capturing active demand, tightening keywords, and building conversion data. $330 on remarketing — cheap touchpoints for everyone who visits your site from any channel (search, organic, referral) but doesn’t convert. The remaining $110 sits in reserve for bid adjustments. You’re spending lean, learning fast, and stopping the bleeding of warm visitors walking away forever.
60–90 days in: You introduce Performance Max — but only once your search campaigns have generated strong, hard-to-fake conversion signals. Booked intro calls. Scheduled meetings. Not form fills for a free guide that bots can trigger. PMax uses those signals to find more of the right people across Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, and display. You’re not spray-painting the internet — you’re extending proven, high-intent audiences into broader channels using real data, not guesswork.
This is multi-channel marketing done correctly. Not all channels at once from day one. The right channels in the right order.
The Full-Funnel Picture
When all three campaign types work together — in sequence — they create a compounding effect that a single campaign type never can.
Search catches active demand. It’s your floor. Remarketing converts the warm traffic that search (and organic, and referral) generates but doesn’t immediately close — and it does it across every platform your prospects use, not just Google. Display and Performance Max keep you visible to the broader market and feed new prospects into the top of the funnel. Each stage feeds the next. None of them work in isolation.
This compounding structure is what separates advisors who say “Google Ads doesn’t work” from the ones quietly filling their calendars. It’s the core of the EVANCED Marketing Platform — and it’s also the framework behind our Fractional CMO engagements, where we run the entire paid media strategy, not just one campaign type.
What to Ask Your Agency
Before you hand over a retainer, ask these five questions. A good agency answers them easily. A bad one gets defensive or vague.
Which campaign type are you starting with, and why? If the answer isn’t “search,” ask them to justify it in writing.
What’s the landing page strategy? Are you sending traffic to our homepage, or building a dedicated conversion page? (Homepage = wasted spend.)
When does remarketing start — and on which platforms? If they’re only running Google remarketing and ignoring Facebook and Instagram, they’re leaving warm prospects behind. And if they say “we’ll add it later” without a specific reason, push back.
How are you tracking conversions — form fills only, or calls too? If they’re not tracking phone calls, they’re missing at least half the picture for financial advisors.
What does success look like at 30, 60, and 90 days? Get specific numbers and milestones — not vague promises about “optimization.”
These aren’t trick questions. They’re the minimum bar for anyone managing paid media for a financial advisory practice. See what we’ve done for other advisors — and notice we publish actual numbers, not testimonials.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grant Carmichael
Founder & Chief Strategist, EVANCED · MBA, CISSP, GCSA · Google Certified Partner
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