Finance marketers are top spenders on digital advertisements and it is a vertical market where there is ample opportunity for advertisers across the globe. Finance advertising on the open web is a big market for the United Kingdom (UK) in particular—approximately 35% of all campaigns run on Taboola in the UK are associated with the finance industry.

Taboola’s Global Trends in Native Advertising for Finance 2018 Report arms advertisers with information to better identify opportunities to compete effectively. Our trends include campaigns for mortgage companies, banks, fintech and many other financial institutions.

We looked at supply and demand for finance content in 12 leading countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, The United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). We analysed how much finance advertisers and their competitors are spending to promote content in these countries (supply), and how much people are clicking on that same content (demand).The UK was the country with the highest market supply, meaning, the UK has been identified by finance marketers as extremely high-value, and that the spend percentage in the UK is the highest in the world.

We ran a by-platform analysis to see the supply and demand of content promoted on desktop, tablet and mobile. In the UK, we see the highest CTR on tablets, followed by desktop then mobile. Images and headlines play a key role in the performance of a campaign, so we looked at insights that covered image characteristics and title keywords. The finance category was different from trends we see universally, in almost every way.

These were the top insights we saw regarding images used in native advertising campaigns for the finance category and based on global data:

• Images without animals have a 100% higher CTR than images with animals.
• Black and white images have a 49% higher CTR than colourful images.
• Images with no people in them have a 30% higher CTR than images with people in them.

As you can imagine, clicking behaviours vary by country, and the top performing creative variations were different in the UK. For finance content In the UK, we saw the opposite effect for colourful images as they drove 100% higher CTR as opposed to black and white images. It’s therefore important that marketers are aware of country specific preferences when planning campaigns.

The full report covers insights on finance images related to food, text, gender, location, distance and graphical data, as well as the top trends by country.

The top keywords for the finance industry were a bit less surprising. The keywords in the UK that generated the most demand in a market with the least amount of supply were: Brexit (which increased the click-through rate of ads by 140%), directors, policy, pension, owned, refund, thousands, account, paid, and customers.

Finally, we took a look at several behavioural trends to help finance marketers improve targeting tactics for their native advertising campaigns. We found that the time of day when people are in the mood to sit back and view finance content, and the time at which they’re most likely to click on finance content, isn’t the same.

For finance marketers looking to run successful performance campaigns as opposed to successful brand awareness campaigns, this information could spell a huge different in success.

For impressions, you want to target any time during the working day. The graph below shows a heat map to reflect this trend:

Clicks, however, don’t behave the same way as impressions. Download the full report to see heat maps that break down trends in clicks and CTR for each country.

For the most effective finance campaigns, take into consideration some of the trends that affected finance marketers in 2017, and are helping shape their digital outlook for 2018. This report showcases how advertising preferences vary worldwide, and marketers therefore must adopt a tailored approach for each country. With many techniques offering the potential of 100% higher CTRs in the UK – such as utilising colour images – the advice in this report will empower finance marketers to deliver effective campaigns that engage their chosen region.