Banks spending to find more customers online

Australia's largest retail banks are spending tens of millions of dollars on Google Adwords each year to attract new customers, and to retain existing clients, according to a new study tracking digital marketing spend.

Digital trends data provider SEMrush has studied the key digital marketing aspects of the top ten banks in Australia, finding increasing amounts of business pushed through online channels.

The SEMrush analysis covered traffic, search, advertising trends, social media activities and overall site health of the banks between April and September 2019.

Unsurprisingly, SEMrush found Facebook was the main source of traffic via social media (73 per cent), ahead of Instagram (10 per cent) and Twitter (6 per cent)

More specifically, what the top 10 banks (or 10 plus one, as CBA and its subsidiary Bankwest were both in this study) spent on paid website traffic is enlightening on several fronts:

•    five of the eleven spent between A$1 million to $10 million (ANZ, CommBank, ING, NAB, Suncorp and Westpac);
•    three out of the eleven spent between $100,000 and $1 million (Macquarie Bank, AMP and Bendigo Bank); and
•    Bank of Queensland and Bankwest spent up to $100,000.

On these numbers, Suncorp and ING have an AdWord spend budget on a par with the Big Four. The AdWord spend, however, reflects where banks are identifying their customers are going to source information and spend more time "consuming" content, according to SEMrush.

"Banks are increasingly directing customers to go online for their banking needs. This doesn't necessarily mean that advertising spending is being misdirected as a lot of people have to go online to access their banking related requirements and information," a spokesperson told Banking Day.

"The increase in AdWord is more a reflection of where banking customers go to get the information they need nowadays."

AdWords are also very measurable for marketers, compared to other traditional forms of advertising.

Website traffic analysis showed that (between April-September 2019):
•    almost half the traffic (47 per cent) was direct;
•    referrals (ie, links from other financial, business, industry, retail, tech, news, travel, careers and other web sites) were at 32 per cent;
•    search traffic was 19 per cent; and
•    72 per cent of traffic came from a mobile device.

And according to SEMrush, the top 'trigger' word in ads (ie, the search word or phrase that will see a paid-for ad appear on the customer's page) was "apply online".