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How a $2.4B Credit Union Used Google Performance Max to Achieve a $42 CPA on App Completions

How Geear used Google Performance Max to reach audiences that traditional search would miss. Turning broad reach into high-value app completions across memberships, personal loans, auto loans, and credit cards.

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The Challenge

Credit unions running paid search typically rely on targeted keywords to capture intent at the moment of action. But that approach has limits. It misses members who don’t search in the expected way or who get filtered out by traditional eligibility-focused targeting. A $2.4 billion-asset Massachusetts-based credit union needed a way to reach a wider audience while still driving meaningful lower-funnel actions, such as membership and loan app completions.

 

Keyword Targeting Has Ceilings

Traditional paid search relies on capturing specific keywords, limiting reach to users who search in expected ways.

Keyword Targeting Has Ceilings

Hard-to-Reach Audiences

Members underserved by mainstream lenders are frequently filtered out by traditional intent-based targeting, even when they're a strong fit for the credit union's product mix.

Hard-to-Reach Audiences

Bridging Mid- to Lower-Funnel

Mid-funnel campaign types like PMax aren’t typically expected to directly drive completed applications, instead seeking more engagement or awareness goals.

Bridging Mid- to Lower-Funnel

Balancing Automation with Expertise

PMax's automation requires structured inputs, audience signals, brand exclusions, and high-quality creative to target the right members. Without these guardrails, it drifts toward whatever traffic is cheapest.

Why Performance Max

Performance Max (PMax) is Google’s AI-driven campaign type that delivers ads across all Google platforms (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps) from a single campaign. Rather than relying on specific keyword targeting, PMax uses Google’s signals to reach an ideal audience wherever they are.

For credit unions, this opens up a different way to think about acquisition. Instead of competing for the same high-intent keywords as every other lender, PMax lets us reach a broader, more varied audience, then use compelling creative and tailored landing page experiences to convert interest into application completions.

The Results

Over a 90-day measurement window, the PMax campaign drove a wide range of lower-funnel app completions, including new memberships and personal loan, auto loan, and credit card application completions. These are exactly the kinds of conversions that mid-funnel campaign types aren’t typically expected to deliver, which makes the performance especially notable.

  • $42

    CPA on App Completions

    Average cost per acquisition across membership, personal loan, auto loan, and credit card app completions, demonstrating strong performance for lower-funnel conversions.

  • 5%

    Conversion Rate

    Conversion rate for app completions over the 90-day window is excellent for lower-funnel actions coming from a mid-funnel campaign type.

  • 4

    Product Categories

    Memberships, personal loans, auto loans, and credit cards: a single campaign driving applications across the full product mix.

  • All

    Google inventory

    PMax delivered across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps, reaching users wherever they were.

What Worked

The campaign's success came from reaching members that keyword-based Search would have missed entirely.

PMax's signal-based targeting surfaced the credit union to users that mainstream lenders may have already filtered out of pre-defined audiences and tactics.

These are people whose search and browsing behavior suggested credit challenges, life transitions, or non-traditional financial profiles.

Leading with membership and checking creative gave those visitors an open door into the full product ecosystem, rather than a single-product potential dead end.

The initial touchpoint on the ads’ landing page then routed them to the application that actually fit their needs, whether that was membership, an auto loan, a personal loan, or a credit card.

Solutions Implemented

A $42 blended CPA across memberships, personal loans, auto loans, and credit cards comes in below the Google Search benchmarks for individual product lines like credit cards and mortgages. Plus, PMax pulled it off as a mid-funnel campaign reaching a broader audience pool.

  • Deployed Performance Max with the Right Guardrails

    We ran PMax across all Google platforms (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps) with brand exclusions in place to prevent cannibalization of the companion Search campaign, exact-match branded keywords held in Search, and stable budgets tuned for PMax's learning requirements. High-quality video and image assets fed Google the cues it needed to find the right members.

  • Led with Membership and Checking Creative

    Compelling membership and checking ads served as the entry point, bringing users to the site where they could explore the full product offering rather than being limited to the specific term they may have initially searched.

  • Reframed "Ineligible" as "Underserved"

    Rather than treating non-traditional search behavior as low-quality traffic, we let PMax surface the credit union to users whom the mainstream lending market had passed over. The product ecosystem, not the keyword, decided the fit.

  • Gave Google's AI the Inputs It Needs

    Audience signals, brand exclusions, and credit-union-specific creative did the steering. PMax handled placement and bidding; Geear handled what a qualified member actually looks like.

Key Takeaways for Credit Unions

→ Don’t write off mid-funnel campaign types for lower-funnel goals. With the right creative and landing strategy, PMax can drive completed applications, not just awareness.

→ Broaden the audience instead of narrowing it. Users searching unconventional terms aren’t always ineligible; sometimes, they’re your next member.

→ Lead with the entry-point product, sell the ecosystem. Membership and checking creative brings users in; on-site experience guides them to the right product.

→ Guide the AI; don’t just turn it on. Smart branding and creative assets are how you tell Google’s automation what a qualified credit union member actually looks like.

Why Geear & Performance Max

Google's automation is powerful, but it isn't always built for credit unions. At Geear, we pair PMax's reach with the tactical structure it needs to perform in regulated financial services, brand exclusions to protect Search efficiency, audience signals tuned to member behavior, and creative built around the membership-first acquisition model.

For a $2.4B Massachusetts-based credit union, that combination turned a mid-funnel campaign type into one of the strongest sources of completed applications across the full product mix.


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Christina Odom

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