Each month Nudge looks into Native content to find out which content and publishers perform the best. It’s a chance to see what others are doing and take learnings for the next campaign.

Key Metrics

The most important KPIs to look at are Attention Minutes, Scroll and Conversions.

Attention is the time that a person is actively consuming the content. People have spent an average of 1.03 attention minutes on finance native content, which is 28% higher than in other industries.

Average Scroll is the average people scrolled through the content piece. This is important as it helps you to determine if you need to change the order of content. Finance brands are on average seeing a scroll rate of 60%.

Conversions are the number of people that converted through to the brand site after reading the content. We measure conversions via IP to understand how your content helped drive conversions for the brand over 60-90 days. The average conversion rate for Finance brands is 2.5%.

Publisher Insights

  • The Huffington Post and Forbes are the most active publishers for finance campaigns.
  • Huffington Post focuses on daily lives and it is a good platform for personal finance content and
    retail banking information. The story is relatively more casual and the content is less heavy.
  • Forbes is a more professional platform with a focus on information about business and investment. Financial planning and wealth management articles target people with higher disposable incomes.

Content Insights

  • Most popular content themes include personal finance, investing and financial planning. Children, work and retirements are the main discussions points that are relevant to people’s daily lives.
  • Personal finance and investment topics content formats are primarily videos, articles or interactive pieces. Slideshows or photos are less common.

Social Insights

  • Facebook is the current primary platform for organic traffic in finance campaigns. Facebook accounted for 64% of total shares and 98% in total earned impressions as organic traffic.
  • LinkedIn does drive high social shares for finance campaigns (33% of all social engagement), but is a poor platform for driving people back to the content, with only 1% of earned impressions.

Distribution Insights

  • Newsletters from the publisher are great add-ons, driving drive 2x attention than other sources.
  • When publishers are going to use add on distribution i.e Outbrain, Taboola, etc, ask them to tag
    these separately so that during the campaign you can monitor the performance.
  • Desktop distribution tends to perform the best across devices for finance campaigns since the content usually includes more detailed discussions on professional topics.

Best Practices

Goldman Sachs + Mic
Goldman Sachs recently launched an informative content campaign that included videos about future technologies and new industries on. Mic in Q1 2017.

The content and format are consistent with the target audience. Mic, who are technology-savvy millennials.

There is a strong brand presence on the page, with a noticeable Goldman Sachs branding and links across the page. We recommend emphasizing branding beyond banners and logos, with an integrated approach and multiple calls to actions.

EY branded content
EY recently launched an informative content campaign on how disruption should drive people’s divestment strategies.

The infographics are clear and concise, with sufficient data analytics support. As an accounting firm, the discussions on tax is directly related to EY’s business and the quotes are originally from EY.

There is no competitors’ advertisement on the page, and we would like to highlight this point to campaign managers, in the past we have found content where competitors banners have occupied more space than the sponsored content in Nudge measured campaigns.


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