Survey findings: the Value of Attribution in UK Financial Services  

Marketers in Financial Services are working against a backdrop of issues ranging from concerns about the quality of their analytics – to worries about AdTech Bias – and the ongoing on-off saga around third party cookies.  

In our Value of Attribution in UK Financial Services survey we set out to find where they are currently placing media spend, how effective they believe their measurement of that activity is and how this might need to change in the future to meet an increasingly siloed media landscape.  

Here is a feel for what we found.  

Where financial marketers are placing their media bets 

To give us a baseline, we wanted to gain an understanding of where financial marketers are placing their bets in terms of spend right now.  

Here are some of the key highlights:  

• Meta spend levels for financial brands are low relative to other sectors, hovering around 9-15% of spend depending on sub-sector. This is likely to reflect the highly regulated nature of the markets they operate in and recent deprecation in targeting capability.  
• Spend on programmatic is again low in relative terms but may well reflect the failure of programmatic as a channel. 
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, traditional TV spend is strong, but the rise of digital TV, with Statista reporting that smart TV ownership has exploded from 11% in 2014 to 74% in 2023, presents a huge opportunity. 
• Aggregators like the leader Compare The Market, and others like MoneySupermarket are significant players but the challenge for financial marketers is to access effective attribution to unravel their true level of impact. 

Data accuracy is the biggest painpoint right now 

The impact of AdTech bias is a spectre that also looms large with 79% of respondents expressing concerns here.  

A startling 46% were ‘very concerned’ in Insurance, closely followed by 41% in Savings, which shows that those markets are most heavily impacted by the ‘Walled Garden’ style tactics of reducing reporting data to allow control of marketing activity. 

It is a concern that plays out daily with our customers experiencing huge discrepancies between the data provided by analytics providers and AdTech players like Meta.  

There is still a heavy reliance on third-party cookies 

At the time of going out to research third-party cookie deprecation was full steam ahead and, not surprisingly:  

• 92% of Financial marketers believe that the planned change would impact their marketing efforts 
• 88% indicated that finding a solution was top of their priority list.  

Fast forward to now and incredibly Google has performed a complete u-turn – partly due to privacy concerns about their proposed changes raised by industry bodies like the CMA, IAB and W3C – and they are now proposing retaining cookies in a confusing user choice arrangement, alongside continuing to offer their Privacy Sandbox solutions. 

Confused? Financial marketers should be. In truth, from an advertiser’s perspective, Google isn’t offering any sort of reasonable choice at all. And we believe strongly that the 88% of financial marketers who currently rely on third-party cookies for measurement should be concerned.  

Download your copy of the Survey

If this has whetted your appetite for more and you need to dig into the detail – download a complimentary copy of the full survey now.  

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