Personal Capital

Client Story
Doubled Qualified Registrations via Paid Search While Decreasing Overall Costs

Personal Capital offers award-winning technology that allows users to view and track their net worth in one simple-to-use platform. It combines free financial tools with a team of registered investment advisors to offer wealth management services to qualified investors. With the guidance of digital marketing agency, Metric Theory, paid search marketing has helped Personal Capital grow. Over 850,000 people use Personal Capital to track over $175 billion. While this growth was much desired by Personal Capital, the team wanted to focus their paid search efforts on driving more qualified registered users and needed a partner and strategy to reach this goal.

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Challenge

Personal Capital aimed to grow its advisory business, which specifically requires registrations that meet certain threshold asset levels. The team needed a partner to help them tackle the following challenges of their paid search program:

  • Accurately track qualified registrations and optimize bids towards those that are most valuable
  • Increase the output of non-branded search efforts
  • Adjust bidding strategy based on publisher, keyword, device, geography and demographic to drive the highest qualified registration rate
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Metric Theory Solution

Personal Capital partnered with Metric Theory and Kenshoo to more accurately track qualified registrations driven by paid search, identify the most valuable registrations based on the return gained from the cost of the user, and optimize bids and budgets accordingly. Metric Theory leveraged Kenshoo solutions to improve Personal Capital’s paid search advertising efforts in the following ways:

  • Use Kenshoo Advanced Search to perform regular bid adjustments based on the custom metric of cost per qualified registration. This custom metric enabled Metric Theory to distinguish performance and bid into the most cost effective positions for each group of keywords.
  • Apply dimensions in Kenshoo to compare performance across broader categories of campaigns, such as brand, non brand, and remarketing without restructuring campaigns or pulling multiple reports. This allows Metric Theory to easily determine how non-brand campaigns are performing relative to non-brand overall, versus relative to the overall account, which contains a significant amount of brand traffic.
  • Automate reporting within Kenshoo to aggregate daily performance data for registrations and qualified
    registrations by dimension and campaign.

Performance Results

118%

increase in registrations and qualified registrations

273%

increase in non-brand registrations

378%

increase in non-brand qualified registrations

25%

decrease in non-brand cost-per qualified registration

With the help of Kenshoo, Metric Theory scaled Personal Capital’s paid search marketing 5X within a year while improving efficiency.

When comparing year-over-year performance, Personal Capital was able to increase qualified registrations, non-brand registrations, and qualified registration rate, while decreasing non-brand cost-per qualified registration.