In regards to the advertising budget falling from $146k last...

In regards to the advertising budget falling from $146k last quarter to $75k this quarter.


This is a screenshot from SEMRush, an analytics website about the Google Organic and Google Ads traffic for SWF.

In the past few days it showed the Google Ads dropping to 0. A discrepancy in SEMRush's analytics is possible, or simply pausing the ads or forgetting to fund the account (so it might begin again in the future, or the ads might be refocused on the ETF), but what the data suggests, is that they're happy with the organic growth so have stopped the Google Ads to save money.

I have an old screenshot from SEMRush where they estimated SWF to be spending $6600 a month on Adwords. $20k per quarter. Take that number with a grain of salt, since with my own E-commerce business, SEMRush is way off with their estimate of my ad budget. It's possible that Adwords makes up the majority of the ad budget (it does in my E-commerce website's case).

It's an interesting change though - they might be cutting the ad budget lower than $75k in the December quarter to save money. That would move us further towards break even, or it might make sense to spend the saving on another 1-3 developers to keep improving the website, to encourage organic growth further.

Based on the recent announcements, I was sort of expecting the ad budget to increase, to promote the ETF/Advisor Platform.

Also, another little note is that the organic traffic is showing an increase in the past week. Looking back further, it has spiked considerably in Aug/Sept/Oct. Organic rankings can be volatile, so who knows what will happen next, but as a general rule, SWF should have improving rankings over time since they're gaining a larger market share, and will accumulate more organic links / mentions (eg in news websites, financial websites, bargain websites, forums etc. which Google takes into consideration when calculating rankings).



As a comparison, Commsec has 30x the organic traffic that SWF has, but maybe only 15x the market share. (4% vs 60%? Guessing.) That organic traffic includes brand searches like 'Commsec' but also rank 1 for 'trading' etc because they've accumulated so many backlinks over the years. I think SWF will gradually close the gap, as they're doing with their market share, but it'd be tough to reach the numbers Commsec has.

30.4% active client growth this quarter is a very fast increase in market share (from 3% to 4% market share in 3 months?) (you'd expect Commsec to have -1% to 1% change in active clients). So SWF should start to get more and more mentions in financial publications, once more of them realise that SWF is becoming a big name with high market share.