Over the last 8 years, I’ve worked with fintech startups at various stages – from early teams still shaping their go-to-market strategy, to later-stage scaleups managing multi-million dollar budgets. For instance, at Zilch, a UK-based unicorn, I helped build the paid acquisition department from the ground up. After helping 20+ fintech companies and managing ads across 120+ countries, I’ve seen what works, and just as importantly, what tends to go wrong.
This article is an attempt to address the most common questions founders and marketing teams have – along with key observations from working with fintech startups that are either just beginning with paid acquisition or looking to improve existing efforts.
Align on realistic goals – and give the plan enough time to work
Before launching any campaigns, it’s essential to clearly define what success looks like. That usually means setting KPIs in collaboration with the team or partner managing your ads. If you’re not deeply familiar with paid acquisition yourself, these goals should come from those who are directly responsible for performance – not set in isolation.
It’s also important to stick to the plan once it’s agreed. A three-month test can’t be evaluated accurately after just a week. Making constant changes early on – to budgets, targeting, messaging – breaks the learning process and usually leads to less reliable data.
Trust plays a big role here. Founders often feel pressure to see quick wins, but paid acquisition does not reward short-term micromanagement. Give your team space to execute, then evaluate results together based on clear metrics.
Plan budgets with enough runway to learn and optimize
A common challenge I see is underestimating how much time and budget are needed to validate paid ads as a viable channel. Many teams want to test for two weeks or with a small budget – often $2,000–$5,000 – and hope to make strategic decisions from that.
Unfortunately, in fintech, those numbers rarely provide meaningful insight.
Let’s break down an example. With consumer-facing financial products, users often need to go through multiple steps – from signup to identity verification to first usage. Conversion rates can vary widely, but even a 4–5% conversion from lead to active user means you’ll need at least 1,000 leads to draw meaningful insights. If your cost per lead (CPL) is around $60, you’re looking at $60,000 just to reach that level of insight in one country.
For B2B fintech products – like payment systems or crypto payment gateways – the sales cycle is longer. You may not see a signed deal for 3–6 months. What you can measure sooner is lead quality, interest, and early pipeline activity. But full sales outcomes take time – thus, you need more time to measure the effectiveness of your paid ads campaigns.
Startups often feel this friction when they try to apply eCommerce-style expectations to much more complex products. But fintech isn’t fast fashion. And that’s okay – it just means the measurement approach needs to match the reality of the product.
Compliance and regulations may impact what’s even possible
Before planning any paid acquisition, it’s important to confirm that your product is eligible to be advertised. Platforms like Google, Meta and TikTok have strict policies around financial services, and in many cases, require special licenses or processes.
Sometimes startups find this out only after planning or budgeting. For example, a DeFi company I recently consulted wanted to launch ads, but their product category was simply not allowed under current platform policies. To run ads, they would have needed additional software and compliance approvals, which hadn’t been factored into their go-to-market strategy.
Make sure to review both the platform guidelines and your own licensing situation ahead of time. This prevents wasted effort and helps you budget more accurately.
For B2B products, feedback on lead quality is critical
When you’re selling to businesses, evaluating the quality of each lead is as important as the number of leads. But it’s not enough to say “this lead isn’t good.” You need specifics: why it’s not a fit, what was missing, what signals indicate it was off-target.
I worked with one client where we saw low conversion rates in a region. And when we looked deeper, we realized that the product’s entry cost (which was $250) was simply too high for the average income in that market. Adjusting that threshold led to better-qualified leads and stronger results.
When marketing and sales work closely together to review lead data, it becomes much easier to improve targeting and messaging over time.
Custom analytics is often necessary in fintech
Google Analytics can be helpful for tracking on-site behavior but when it comes to end-to-end attribution, especially for fintech products with complex funnels, it often falls short.
Key data – like user actions that happen post-signup or in your product – may not be attributed correctly if it arrives late or outside cookie windows. In custom analytics setups, you have much more flexibility: you can define your own event structure, sync data from multiple systems, and see the full user journey with accuracy.
If your product has multi-step onboarding, delayed deposits, or offline sales, custom analytics will likely become a necessary investment.
Broader targeting enables stronger performance
Not every fintech product is built for performance marketing from day one. One key factor to consider is the size of your addressable audience.
Paid advertising platforms work best when they have enough data to learn and optimize. That usually requires a broad enough target group to generate consistent conversions, clicks, and engagement signals.
If your product serves a very narrow audience – for example, a specific type of institutional client in one region – the algorithms often struggle to optimize effectively. In such cases, paid ads may not be the most efficient way to drive direct conversions.
That doesn’t mean ads can’t help but the goal might be awareness rather than immediate conversion. You can combine targeted sales outreach with advertising as a reinforcement layer. Just be mindful of how much data the ad platforms need to optimize effectively.
In the end…
Paid acquisition can be a powerful growth lever in fintech – but only when approached with realistic planning, enough time to learn, and a strong feedback loop between marketing, product, and sales.
For early-stage teams, it’s often more practical to begin with a lean setup – whether that’s through a specialized partner or external support – before investing in building an in-house function. This allows you to test core assumptions, avoid premature hiring decisions, and gain clarity on what works before scaling the effort internally.
Taking the time to get these fundamentals right early on can make the difference between steady growth and costly trial and error down the line.
