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Blueprint Finance:
Why we didn’t start with Search Ads
Blueprint Finance helps New Zealanders with mortgages and other finance services.
Business: Blueprint Finance
Industry: Mortgage and finance
Market: Nationwide
Goal: Generate mortgage and finance enquiries
Starting challenge: Search Ads looked like the obvious place to start, but Blueprint would be competing with large banks and finance companies for a small number of prominent ad positions.
Search Ads were an obvious option for Blueprint.
If someone searches for “mortgage broker” or “home loan”, they are clearly interested in the kind of service Blueprint offers.
The problem was the competition.
Blueprint would be competing with large banks and finance companies such as ASB and BNZ. Those businesses can afford to pay a lot for clicks because a mortgage customer can be worth a significant amount over time.
There are also only a handful of prominent ad positions at the top of a Google search.
So the concern was not that Search Ads were a bad option generally. It was that, for Blueprint, Search could be a relatively expensive and difficult place to start.
That is why we decided to start with a Performance Max campaign instead.
A Performance Max campaign gave us many more places to reach potential customers.
Search Ads are mainly competing for those few prominent positions on a Google search results page. Performance Max can also show ads across places like YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps and other Google surfaces.
So instead of relying mainly on winning one of three or four expensive Search ad positions, we had a much broader range of opportunities to reach people.
For Blueprint, that gave us a better chance of finding potential customers without competing head-on with the big banks every time.
Performance Max became the main campaign type for Blueprint and performed well for the account.
Later, Blueprint wanted to promote several other finance services as well as its mortgage offering.
That gave us a genuine reason to test Search.
We launched a Search campaign covering both Blueprint’s mortgage offering and the additional finance services, and gave it a proper test.
The campaign was bringing in clicks from searches that looked relevant to the services Blueprint offered, so the problem was not that Google was sending obviously poor traffic.
Even so, the Search campaign performed poorly compared with the Performance Max campaign.
That supported the original decision to start with Performance Max rather than Search.
The interesting part of this account is that we did not start with the most obvious Google Ads option.
Search looked like a natural fit, but the competition made us think Performance Max had a better chance of working.
Later, when there was a real business reason to test Search, we did. The result supported the original decision.
That does not mean Search Ads are a bad option generally. It just means that for Blueprint, Performance Max has been the stronger fit.
I can review your account, or your plans if you have not started yet, and give you an honest view of where I would put the budget and why.
Request a free Google Ads review
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