Fintech PPC agency · Kenya
Paid search and paid social for regulated Kenyan financial products, run by someone who does the platform checks, the category setup and the disclosure review before the campaign is built, not after it is rejected.
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Quoted to your scope · two weeks · the usual first engagement
Earlier roles, USD
Results from earlier roles, reported in US dollars as they were at the time. Not Momentum client engagements.
$80 → $40 cost per lead in six weeks. A US fintech’s Google Ads account on a $5k/month budget, with verified lead volume up 60%. Prior role, not a Momentum engagement. Read the case study →
Who this is for
Most paid media agencies have never had an account disabled. That is not a criticism of their work — it is a description of the categories they run in. If your product touches money, the platform is a regulator before it is a channel.
Every engagement is quoted to its scope in a written proposal, in Kenya shillings. Most start with the Acquisition Audit, sold standalone. How we price.
What actually goes wrong
Platform gates sit in front of the auction, not after it. Target a market on Google’s verification list without being verified, or advertise a loan shorter than Google’s 61-day or Meta’s 90-day minimum, and the ads cannot serve at all. The campaign signed off in January is still dark in March, and nobody on the team can say why.
It is worse than a delay, because the usual diagnostic instincts do not fire. Spend is zero, impressions are zero, and the account looks healthy.
Meta’s financial-services rules decide which products you can advertise at all (nothing for loans of 90 days or less) and who you can reach (18 and over for credit, loans and insurance). Building the plan before checking them does not just narrow the audience: it can leave your main product unadvertisable.
Teams find this out after the media plan has been costed against targeting that was never available to them.
Google's financial products policy puts requirements on the landing page, not only the ad — and they have to be visible without a click or a hover. A disclosure in an accordion is a disclosure that is not there.
So the ad is disapproved for something that is nowhere in the ad, and the fix sits with a team that does not own the ad account. In Kenya there is a legal side to the same problem: the Competition Act expects every fee to be disclosed before sign-up, and a digital lender’s pages have to show the full cost of credit and say it is regulated by the CBK.
The part other agencies find out the hard way
Compliance as a slogan is already crowded. What is almost never published is the mechanics — which regulator, which identifier, which field has to match, and which markets are not in the programme at all. Here is ours, with dates.
Google requires financial services advertiser verification in a specific list of countries, and a separate verification for each targeted location. The list is the thing most teams get wrong, in both directions: they assume it is global, or they assume their market is exempt. For a Kenya-only campaign, as things stand, it does not apply.
| Market | In Google's financial services verification programme? | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Kenya | No | Kenya is not on Google’s list (checked October 2026). Advertiser identity verification and the financial products policy still apply in full, and your regulator (CBK, CMA, IRA or SASRA) still governs the promotion itself. |
| United Kingdom | Yes | FCA authorisation, or a Financial Services Register listing as an Exempt Professional Firm or Recognised Investment Exchange. It only matters if you target UK audiences. |
| 24 EEA countries | Yes — from 23 July 2026 | Rolling enforcement, handled through Google’s external partner G2. This is what a Kenyan advertiser walks into the moment it targets Europe. |
| United States | No | Not on Google’s list. Irrelevant to a Kenya-only campaign; listed so you know where the gates are if you ever widen. |
Which markets Google verifies, and where a regulator pre-clears the ad itself, are in our fintech ad approval map. If you are a licensed lender, what a CBK-licensed digital lender can advertise sets out the repayment-period rules Google and Meta apply.
The Kenyan gate almost nobody writes about. For a Kenyan lender the block is rarely verification; it is tenor. Google allows personal-loan ads only for loans repayable in 61 days or more, and Meta bans loans of 90 days or less, so a typical 30-day mobile loan cannot be advertised on either platform at all. Forex is similar: Google needs a CMA licence plus its own certification, and Meta bans it outright. It reads as a rejection of your brand. It is a product rule, and checking it before the media plan is costed is the first thing we do. Bidding on a rival’s brand name is a separate question; when it pays, and what Kenyan law says about the ad copy, is in our guide to bidding on competitor brand names.
Meta’s advertising standards apply in Kenya as everywhere else: no ads for loans of 90 days or less, payday loans, CFDs or binary options, so forex is off Meta even for a CMA-licensed broker. Credit, loan and insurance ads must target people aged 18 and over, and the ad itself must not ask for financial information, a clause a lot of lead-form creative fails. Where Meta’s special ad category for financial products applies (it is mandatory for US-targeted ads and applies to credit ads reaching Canada or parts of Europe; advertisers elsewhere, including in Kenya, can opt in or out), it also removes lookalikes, saved audiences and detailed targeting. If your plan was written against targeting the platform will not allow, the plan needs rewriting, not adapting. We would rather tell you that before the budget is committed.
Google’s financial products and services policy asks for disclosures on the destination, visible without a click or a hover. For a personal loan that means the minimum and maximum repayment period, the maximum APR, and a representative example carrying every applicable fee. Across financial products generally it means the physical address of the business and all associated fees. Loans repayable in under 61 days are not allowed at all, which rules out most short-tenor Kenyan mobile loans.
None of that is hard to satisfy. It is hard to satisfy late, because by then the disclosure is competing for the space above the fold with the message that made the ad work. The answer is to design the page with the disclosure block in it, not to bolt one on after a disapproval. The full pass — the four separate reviews a fintech page has to clear before it goes live — is in our guide to landing page compliance for fintech. What the ad itself has to carry, rule by rule, is in our guide to financial services advertising regulations for paid search, and every Kenyan check is in the fintech ad compliance checklist. For investment funds, the CMA rules on the ad are set out in our guide to advertising a money market fund in Kenya.
Every regulated account has a second approval queue that has nothing to do with the platform: your own compliance or legal reviewer. Agencies that treat that queue as someone else's problem lose two weeks per creative cycle to it, then describe the account as slow.
We work the other way round. Claims are substantiated before the copy is drafted, so review is checking a citation rather than relitigating a sentence. Variants go to review in batches, not one at a time. And the reviewer gets a document that says which claim rests on which source — which is the difference between a sign-off in a day and a meeting in a fortnight.
The work
Before any campaign is built: confirm what each platform allows for your product and which verification, if any, applies, get the submission right the first time, and classify the ad sets into the correct special ad category. Where verification does not apply, we say so rather than billing for it. The requirements, market by market, are in our guide to Google Ads financial services verification.
Campaign and ad group architecture built around a 90 to 180 day cycle — match types, negative keyword strategy, and a search terms discipline that stops budget leaking into queries that will never become pipeline.
Pages built with the disclosure block designed in, the address and fee statements where the policy expects them, and the conversion path intact around them. Written to clear legal on the first pass.
Structured testing that respects what the category actually allows — message and offer first, and audience slicing only where your targeting leaves room for it. On Meta this is where most of the remaining leverage lives once targeting is fixed. We set out exactly what the Meta special ad category removes, and what fintech advertising still has left.
GA4 and CRM tracking built so the numbers reconcile: conversion and call tracking, offline conversion import where the deal closes in a CRM, and an honest account of what consent mode and platform restrictions do to attribution in this category. Before a CRM list becomes a Customer Match audience, check it against our guide to the Data Protection Act Kenya for fintech marketers.
Paid tells you inside a week which message lands. Those winners become the pages we build organically on the SEO side, and organic then takes over terms you were renting. One team, one number. Run together, they make up one fintech marketing program.
Measurement
A 30-day return figure on a product with a four-month sales cycle is not a performance number. It is a number that cannot be true yet, reported against a window that guarantees it will mislead.
On a long sales cycle, payback is measured in quarters, not weeks. Anyone promising a payback period shorter than your own sales cycle is promising a number that cannot be true yet. Check your own numbers with the free ROAS calculator, and plan a budget, verification weeks included, with the Google Ads cost calculator. How we work →
Proof
Momentum AdWorks is a specialist practice, not a large agency. Everything below is real. Where the work was done in a prior role rather than for Momentum, it says so.
Zero ads rejected across a full-funnel Meta programme in financial services. Our own acquisition, run end to end. In this category that is not a nice-to-have — it is the difference between a campaign that runs and a quarter you lose.
One campaign on native Meta lead forms, at about $4.03 a lead (Momentum's own test, USD); 189 across nine campaigns. Momentum's own acquisition. Read the case study.
A US fintech's Google Ads account on a $5k/month budget, with verified lead volume up 60%. Account restructure, conversion and call tracking, negative keywords, creative testing. Prior role, not a Momentum engagement. Read the case study.
On the first traffic test: 719 landing-page views at $0.03 each (Momentum's own test, USD). 3,926 across the programme. Momentum's own campaigns.
What it costs
There is no price list. Every engagement is quoted to its scope in a written proposal, in Kenya shillings, after a 20-minute fit call. We never charge a percentage of ad spend: that caps our fee exactly when we succeed at cutting your waste.
Quoted to your scope, about two weeks. A paid account and compliance-risk review, a keyword and demand map, a tracking and attribution gap analysis, and a prioritised 90-day plan you can execute with us or without us.
Quoted monthly, shaped to the plan the audit produces. Three-month initial term, then month to month. No annual lock-in. If a workstream is not producing after 90 days we cut it and re-scope rather than keeping you on it.
One guarantee, and it is narrow because it is the part we control: if we cannot get your advertising account approved and compliant within 30 days of kickoff, you do not pay the management fee for that month. Exclusions are published on How we work.
Questions
Very few, and the ones that do tend to be either large paid-media shops with a fintech client or two, or generalists with a vertical page. The distinction worth testing in a first call is simple: ask what Google and Meta allow for your specific product in Kenya. An agency that runs regulated accounts will answer with a tenor rule, a regulator and a disclosure list. One that does not will answer with a process.
Not from Google for Kenya, as things stand. Google requires financial services verification in a list of 42 countries, including the United Kingdom and 24 EEA countries phased in from 23 July 2026, and Kenya is not on it (checked October 2026). Advertiser identity verification and the financial products policy apply regardless, and in Kenya the product rules matter more: personal-loan ads only for loans repayable in 61 days or more on Google, nothing for loans of 90 days or less on Meta. We check this per product at the start rather than assuming, because the lists change.
It depends on scope, so we quote it: a written proposal in Kenya shillings after a 20-minute fit call, and most engagements start with the two-week Acquisition Audit. Ad spend is separate and always paid by you directly to the platform; we never bill a percentage of it. More on how we price.
That is the first conversation, and it moves to the front of the queue — appeal windows are short. What we can promise is a properly built appeal and an honest read on whether the underlying cause is fixable, which is often a policy violation on the landing page rather than anything in the account. What nobody can promise is reinstatement; anyone who does is guessing on your behalf. If you are drafting one now, start by reading the reason code before you appeal. On Google, first check which kind of Google Ads suspension you have: a billing suspension and an egregious one need different first moves.
Paid is fast for signal and slow for pipeline. You will know within a week or two which messages earn clicks, and within a month which earn qualified leads. Pipeline impact takes as long as your sales cycle takes, often 90 to 180 days for B2B fintech. We report the leading indicators monthly or every two weeks, depending on the retainer, so the wait is visible rather than silent.
As a scheduled reviewer with a defined queue, not an obstacle. Claims are substantiated before drafting, copy goes over in batches with the source for each claim attached, and we keep a record of what was approved so the next cycle starts from precedent. If you have a review SLA, we build the production calendar around it.
Yes, and in this category the platform mix matters more than usual because the restrictions differ. Meta's special ad category for financial products removes targeting that LinkedIn still allows. Microsoft and LinkedIn each run their own arrangements for financial services. We would rather run two channels properly than five badly. Our guide to what LinkedIn ads cost in Kenya explains how the auction prices you.
No. You get a named person on the account, and that person does the work. We are small, which is exactly why we are strict about fit: we would rather turn work away than run it through a freelancer bench.
Next
Two weeks, quoted to your scope. You get a paid account and compliance-risk review, a keyword and demand map, a tracking and attribution gap analysis, and a prioritised 90-day plan, yours to execute with us or without us.
Start the Acquisition Audit Tell us what is wrong with the account
We reply within one working day. If you are outside the range we will say so in a reply rather than in the thirtieth minute of a discovery meeting.
We ask for your team size and monthly ad spend on the form because it saves us both a call. We work with regulated Kenyan fintechs and Kenyan SaaS companies. If you are outside that, we will say so in a reply rather than in the thirtieth minute of a discovery meeting.
Not ready for the audit? Use the same form and say so in “What are you trying to solve?” — we answer questions without a pitch. We do not sell, share or enrich your data. Privacy statement.