Banks, building societies, lenders, mortgage brokers, insurers and independent financial advisers can all win customers from Google search, but the account has to be built for a regulated firm from the start. I set up and manage Google Ads for UK financial services firms with Google’s verification, the FCA’s financial promotion rules and your compliance sign-off planned into the work, so campaigns go live without a run of disapprovals and every ad is one your firm is content to stand behind.
If you run a payments app, money transfer service or another technology-led product, the Google Ads page for fintech companies is the closer fit. This page is for firms whose customers are choosing a mortgage, loan, policy, savings product or adviser.
How people search for financial products and advice in the UK
Financial searches tend to fall into three groups, and each needs different keywords, bids and pages.
- Research searches. “How much can I borrow”, “fixed or tracker mortgage”, “do I need life insurance with a mortgage”. These come early, comparison sites and consumer finance publishers answer most of them, and they rarely turn into an enquiry from an ad click. I usually leave them to content and SEO.
- Situation searches. “Mortgage broker for self-employed”, “bridging loan for an auction purchase”, “pension advice before retirement”, “income protection for contractors”. The person knows what they need and wants someone who handles cases like theirs. This is where a smaller firm’s budget usually works hardest.
- Local and trust searches. “Independent financial adviser Croydon”, “mortgage adviser near me”, or your firm’s name with “reviews” or “FCA”. Many people still choose an adviser close to home, and they check who you are before they pick up the phone.
The decision is slow and considered. Someone remortgaging might click an ad, leave, compare three brokers and come back by searching your name a fortnight later. An account that judges every click on the same day will undervalue the searches that actually start those journeys.
What is different about Google Ads for a regulated firm
Verification comes before anything runs
Google asks most advertisers of financial products and services in the UK to complete its financial services verification, which checks the firm against the FCA Register. The legal name and authorisation details in the account have to match the register. Until it is approved, ads for mortgages, loans, investments and similar products will not serve, so I start it in the first week rather than finding the gap on launch day.
Every ad is a financial promotion
A search ad inviting someone to take out a mortgage or a loan is a financial promotion. It has to be fair, clear and not misleading, and approved under your firm’s own process. Space is tight: under the FCA’s consumer credit and mortgage rules, quoting an interest rate or a cost figure can require a representative example alongside it, which will not fit in a headline. Most finance ads therefore describe the service and who it suits, and leave figures and full disclosures to the landing page.
Responsive search ads add a complication. Google mixes headlines and descriptions into combinations you never see written out, so each line has to stand up on its own and beside any other. I write with that in mind, pin lines where a combination could mislead, and give compliance one document listing every line and every pinning rule to approve.
Keywords that bring the right enquiries
Finance keywords attract plenty of searches you cannot help: people looking for their existing lender’s login page, complaints and claims searches, job hunters and products you do not offer. Broad match without a firm negative keyword list will find all of them. I start with phrase and exact match on situation and local searches, add negatives from the search terms every week in the early months, and widen only once the tracking shows which enquiries turn into business.
Landing pages compliance can sign off once
Sending ads to a homepage or a long product page wastes money in any sector. In finance, a dedicated page for each product or type of client also makes approval simpler: one signed-off page carrying the right risk warnings, representative examples, firm details and FCA status, which every ad in that group can point to. If you need pages built for this, I also offer landing pages designed for paid campaigns.
Measuring what an enquiry is worth
A form submission is not a completed mortgage or a new advice client. Many enquiries turn out to be ineligible, unreachable or not ready, and if Google is told every form is a success, it goes looking for more of the cheapest ones. Where your CRM records the outcome, I feed qualified enquiries and completed cases back as offline conversions, so the bidding learns from business rather than clicks. Under UK GDPR and PECR, the click IDs that make this possible are only stored once a visitor accepts cookies, and what you share with Google has to match what your privacy notice says.
How I run the work
- Check the basics. Your FCA permissions, the products you want to promote, how your approval process works and who signs off, plus the state of verification and tracking in any existing account.
- Plan the account. Separate campaigns for your brand, for each product line and, for advice firms, for the areas you serve, so budgets and wording for mortgages never spill into protection or investments.
- Draft for approval. Keywords, negatives, every ad line and the landing page copy, supplied together so compliance reviews one pack rather than a trickle of changes.
- Launch carefully. Modest budgets, a close eye on search terms and disapprovals in the first fortnight, and fixes before anything is scaled up.
- Manage month by month. Reporting on cost per qualified enquiry and, where the data allows, per completed case, with any new copy going back through your process first. The ongoing side runs as part of my monthly PPC management.
One boundary is worth stating plainly. I run the advertising; I do not give financial advice, and approving promotions under FCA rules stays with your firm. The process above is built so your approver has everything they need, in one place, before anything goes live.
Mistakes I see in finance accounts
- Launching before verification. Campaigns sit limited or disapproved, and the budget goes on whatever slips through.
- Bidding on big lenders’ names. People searching a bank’s name usually want that bank’s own site, so the clicks are costly and rarely become enquiries.
- Counting every form as a conversion. Cheap, unqualified enquiries look like success while completed business quietly falls.
- Careless remarketing. Following people around the web after they read a page about arrears or debt is poor practice. Google’s personalised advertising policy restricts targeting around sensitive personal circumstances, and the Consumer Duty expects firms to avoid causing foreseeable harm.
- Copy edited after approval. A headline tweaked in the account by someone outside the process is an unapproved promotion. The account’s change history makes this easy to check, so I review it every month.
- No watch on your own brand. Clone firms sometimes borrow the names of genuine authorised firms. A brand campaign and a regular look at who appears for your name help you spot imitators early and report them to Google and the FCA.
Where SEO and other channels fit
Google Ads is quick to start and easy to pause, which suits product launches, rate changes and local advice firms that need enquiries now. The research searches described earlier are usually cheaper to win through content, and that work is covered on my page about SEO for banks, brokers and financial firms. Running both lets the search terms from your ads show which questions are worth writing about. Solicitors face a similar mix of regulator and Google rules, and my Google Ads approach for law firms builds approval into the work in the same way.
Next step
If you are a UK regulated firm weighing up Google Ads, or unhappy with an account already running, get in touch to book a call. Tell me which products you want to promote and how your approval process works, and I will tell you what I would set up first and whether verification or tracking needs attention before any money is spent.