Fidelity, iShares, T. Rowe Price Most Aggressive In Paid Search

Update: In my sugar haze, I inexplicably overlooked Fidelity, by far the largest paid search advertiser in our space, according to Spyfu.com! I corrected this post a few hours after publishing it.

I have a secret weapon that I use when I want to get something done. It’s called a generous bowl of Trix Swirls (whole grain, nr aturally). It’s not just for kids.

Having powered up on some Trix the other day, I set out to finally answer a question I always wondered about: Which mutual fund companies and exchange-traded fund (ETF) providers are the most aggressive in paid search?

Organic search success—how much traffic your site pulls in from search engines—is a function of many variables influenced by: the quality, quantity and uniqueness of your content, the size of your company, the extent of your online relationships, how your investment products are distributed, the number of your shareholders, etc.

If your site dominates search engine results on important keywords or if you're satisfied overall with the other marketing tactics you're using to support campaigns or raise general brand awareness, maybe you don’t need to compete using paid search.

What's important is that you understand the competition that's happening online. Trix isn’t just for kids and competing isn’t just for salespeople in physical settings. Mano a mano combat may not come naturally to mutual fund and ETF marketers. But, you've seen first-hand how the business environment has changed.

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A Look At How Asset Managers See The Second-Half

The third week after the close of the quarter? Hey, that means there might be new commentary on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web sites.

(In fact, not all sites have been updated yet, have they? But you know who you are and you know better than me what your "bottlenecks" are.)

As a speed-reading approach to reviewing what appears to be predominantly positive outlooks, I turned to Wordle.net for the visualizations below of what T. Rowe Price, First Trust Portfolios, OppenheimerFunds, BlackRock and Fidelity Investments expect in the second half of the year. Interested in others'? You can create your own in a snap.

T. Rowe Price U.S. Stock Market Quarterly Market Wrap-up

 

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5 Random Highlights Of Mutual Fund, ETF Websites

Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?

It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That's why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!

A question to the managers of these sites: Are you leveraging them as the link bait you should in order to draw visitors to your site, first to that page and maybe to explore the rest of your value proposition?

1. Fidelity Investments’ Historical Yield Curve
Of all the gorgeous, exciting visualizations of data to be found on the Web today, this isn’t one of them. But it’s a true gem, very, very cool. A site visitor could spend minutes on this page learning. Marketing managers, when it’s time to hire again and you have a green marketing communications staffer, park them in front this.

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SPECIAL REPORT: The Effect Of The Market Meltdown On Traffic To Top Mutual Fund, ETF Web Sites

Net outflows from equity and fixed-income funds were at record dollar levels in October, according to Lipper, Inc. How did October’s market meltdown affect traffic to mutual fund, ETF and other investment company Web sites? We’ve been eager to analyze the data.

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Fidelity Mashup Recognized

Congratulations to Fidelity Investments, whose mashups rank today on Peter Kim’s list of notable brand examples of social media.

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