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Everyone thinks they have a unique paid media problem.
They usually don’t.
After analysing a year’s worth of paid media opportunities at Growth Gorilla, across different fintechs, financial services brands, budgets and markets, the same problems kept showing up.
In this episode of The Fintech Marketers & Leaders Podcast, Shameer Sachdev sits down with Ross Smith, Head of Performance Marketing at Growth Gorilla, to break down what’s actually holding paid media performance back.
And spoiler: it’s not always the paid media.
A bad CAC or disappointing ROAS might be the symptom. But the real problem could sit somewhere completely different, weak tracking, poor conversion rates, tired creative, messy attribution or an over-reliance on a single channel.
Ross breaks down how to diagnose the real problem before throwing more budget at it.
What you’ll learn:
Why relying on one channel is a dangerous game
If Google drives 80% of your acquisition, you don’t have much room to manoeuvre when CPCs suddenly jump. Ross explains why fintechs should build a second channel before they desperately need one.
Or, as he puts it:
“Diversify when you’re bored, not when you’re scared.”
Why more channels ≠ better marketing
Diversification matters. Spreading yourself too thin doesn’t.
Two channels with the right budget, creative and strategy can outperform five channels running half-baked campaigns. Master what you have before chasing the next shiny platform.
Why Meta has become a creative platform
Granular targeting isn’t the lever it once was.
Algorithms now handle much of the targeting, bidding, delivery and placement work. That leaves marketers with three big levers: budget, optimisation and creative.
Only one is practically unlimited.
Creative.
Ross explains why your first three seconds can do more targeting work than hours spent building increasingly complicated audience segments.
Why beautiful ads can still perform badly
Stop designing ads to impress your manager.
Start designing them for the feed.
Fintech teams can spend too much time creating the perfect, beautifully polished ad, only to discover nobody clicks it.
Ross explains why creative volume, genuinely different concepts and clear calls to action matter more than endless polishing.
Why attribution will never be perfect
Attribution is messy. Consent, multiple devices, longer buying journeys and competing platforms claiming credit aren’t making it any simpler.
Instead of chasing perfect attribution, Ross explains how to build a measurement framework you can trust enough to make better decisions, and why first-party data should be your source of truth.
Why CTR probably doesn’t belong in your board meeting
A brilliant click-through rate doesn’t automatically mean brilliant marketing.
You can create curiosity, generate loads of clicks and still have a terrible conversion rate.
Use CTR to understand creative performance. Don’t confuse it with business performance.
Why your campaign plateau might have nothing to do with media buying
Sometimes the campaign is fine.
The landing page isn’t.
Ross walks through the first things he checks when performance stalls, from account structure and tracking integrity to creative diversity and the post-click journey.
He also explains why what looks like “audience exhaustion” is often just creative fatigue.
Why tracking comes before everything else
If your tracking is wrong, your numbers are wrong.
And if your numbers are wrong, every decision you make from them becomes questionable.
Before obsessing over campaign structures, bid strategies or the latest platform feature, get the foundations right.
As Ross says:
“Fix the tracking.”
Plus, we get into:
- When to introduce your second paid media channel
- Why you shouldn’t raid a successful channel to fund a new one
- The biggest Meta and Google myths fintech marketers still believe
- Where Performance Max can add value beyond ecommerce
- How much creative fintechs should actually test
- Why creative production becomes a process problem at scale
- What changes when you go from £10k to £100k to £1m in monthly spend
- The difference between simply scaling and creating compounding growth
- Why compliance and approval processes can kill scale
- Why YouTube deserves more attention from fintech marketers
- The one metric Ross thinks every marketer should watch: payback period
If you’re a CMO, Head of Marketing, Head of Growth, acquisition lead or performance marketer trying to get more from paid media, this episode gives you a practical framework for figuring out what’s actually broken — and what to fix next.
No platform hacks. No vanity metrics. No pretending another campaign restructure will magically solve everything.
Just better paid media.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Fintech Marketers & Leaders Podcast.
The FML Podcast is brought to you by Growth Gorilla, the marketing agency that doesn’t “also do fintech and financial services”. Fintech and financial services are all we do.
