Pay-per-click (PPC) insurance advertising can bring high-quality traffic to your insurance website and generate highly measurable results when appropriately leveraged. Despite its high ROI potential, many independent insurance agents are unable to make the most of Google Ads to boost their earnings. Insurance keywords have a high cost per click (roughly $48.41), which can be a stumbling block for many agents with underperforming PPC campaigns. This high CPC for insurance is unsustainable over the long run if you’re consistently unable to yield quality clicks. Since you’re not getting any meaningful conversions, you may choose to abandon the campaign and cut your huge losses.
However, the amount of money insurance companies get from an individual signing up for insurance with them makes high cost-per-click rates worth the investment. With an independent insurance agent’s commissions varying between 2%-8% of premiums (depending on state regulations), if your commission is 8%, you’ll make $40,000 per year for selling $500,000 in insurance premiums.
The Importance of ROI in Online Advertising
Pay-Per-Click ROI or ROAS (return on ad spend) is the money you made from your online insurance advertising compared to the cost of your campaign over a specific duration. To calculate the ROI of your PPC ads, take the total commission earned after selling policies through PPC, subtract your total campaign costs, then divide by your overall campaign costs. The percentage figure you get will be your PPC ROI or ROAS.
You should consistently track your advertising ROI to determine whether your budget for the campaign is justifiable. If you don’t calculate your PPC ROI, you could end up wasting too much money on ads that don’t yield quality clicks and insurance sales. ROI tells you what’s working and what’s not, letting you tweak various aspects of your campaign where necessary to maximize returns.
How Insurance Agents Can Maximize Their Return on Ad Spend
To yield an optimum PPC ROI or ROAS, you must get high-quality clicks. This requires putting the bulk of your ads in front of prospective policyholders. Here’s a look at some practical insurance advertising ideas to get maximum PPC conversions and value for your independent agency.
1. Have a dedicated landing page
You can generate maximum leads by directing your Google Ads to a dedicated landing page. This page should be straightforward, include persuasive elements, and invite potential policyholders to take definite action, such as “Get your free quote.” Website pages can also be used as a landing page, but your SEO team may have a different goal with their page, which could compromise your PPC campaign because of the lack of content required by your target audience. So, have your own dedicated landing page and provide all the answers on that page that your prospective buyers may be looking for.
2. Setup highly targeted campaigns
Highly targeted campaigns can get you high ROIs, which is what you need to compete effectively with more established industry giants. This strategy involves using tight-themed long-tail keyword groupings, both in your ads and landing page content. Long-tail keywords like “life insurance policy for critical illness” work because they indicate higher intent to purchase. Most prospects looking to buy will use such descriptive phrases instead of broad keywords like “life insurance policies.” As you can understand, this broad keyword has multiple search intent. A person using this keyword could be only looking for a description of a life insurance policy instead of searching for a product to buy. Also, the competition around these broad keywords is too high to beat as big insurance brands would occupy all the ranking space.
To conclude, you stand a higher chance of getting your prospective buyers’ attention and clicks if you incorporate targeted long-tail keywords in your compelling PPC ad copies. To maximize conversions, your landing page content must resonate with the keywords and user intent.
3. Keep a close eye on negative keywords
Use negative keywords in your ad groups to avoid wasting your insurance advertising budget on irrelevant traffic. For example, if you’re selling life insurance, you can add the word “pet” as a negative keyword. This tells Google not to display your ad whenever a user includes the negative keyword in their search query. This strategy lets you spend more on relevant queries that yield quality traffic.
4. Use laser-targeted ad copies
Generic ad copies lead to wastage of marketing spend—avoid them at all costs. Forget about the large swathes of the population that don’t need the type of policies you’re offering. Instead, design your insurance ad with the uniqueness that compels the right audience to click through it. A billionaire wouldn’t be interested in your burial policies, for example. As mentioned earlier, the user or search intent tells you the keywords to target in your ad copies, boosting your campaign’s ROI
5. Chase your website visitors with retargeting campaigns
Most of your web visitors won’t purchase a policy the first time they interact with you. Although it cost you to get their attention, they’re less likely to come back unless you retarget them. Retargeting campaigns let you chase those audiences who have already engaged with your brand through websites or videos. They’ll keep seeing your insurance ads when they visit other websites, which helps increase your brand recall lift. The more they experience your brand presence, the more they will remember it. This increases your chances of influencing their decision-making.
A pro tip here is to retarget them with multiple variations of your display ad creatives that highlight different features or USPs (unique selling propositions) of your insurance agency and products in each creative. Showing different USPs every subsequent time has a higher potential of influencing their decision-making than shouting about a single message every time they get to see your display ad. That would probably annoy them more instead of influencing them to return to your website.
6. Track your KPIs
Clicks are vital, but they aren’t the only PPC performance metric you should track. Therefore, identify your key performance indicators and keep monitoring and measuring them. For example, since you’ll be earning a commission each time a policyholder you brought on board renews, you may want to track renewal rates or customer lifetime value. These metrics primarily indicate client satisfaction after acquisition. Nonetheless, they also indicate your marketing campaign’s long-term success. Tracking all your KPIs provides more in-depth insights to drive your ad campaign in the right direction.
7. Maximize your search impression share
Now that we have already discussed the importance of measuring the right KPIs in the last point, let’s dig into one of the specifics for Google Ads. Your impression share indicates the amount of exposure your ad is given compared to your competitors. Therefore, increasing the metric boosts your chances of connecting with your target audience through PPC ads. You may try these tactics to increase your ad impression share:
- Increase your bid - By boosting your bids, you can improve the chance of your ads standing out in the auctions.
- Increase your budget - Your budget controls how often your ads will be shown. Thus increasing your budget will increase your impression share.
- Incorporate higher ranking long-tail keywords - Being intent-specific, long-tail keywords are more likely to draw in the right audience, even more so when they are highly ranked.
8. Choose the right time to run your ads
The timing of your insurance Google Ads has to be right to make the most out of your campaigns. Your objective is to get maximum ad exposure when most of your target audiences are online. Fortunately, Google Ads lets you change the time or day to show your ads based on market conditions. The feature is particularly useful for insurance agents who experience slow sales months, especially during holiday seasons. Such a time wouldn’t be ideal for increasing your ad spend as most prospects would be less responsive.
9. Track the stats and adapt
Measure and act on every metric indicative of your PPC campaign’s effectiveness to improve ROI. For example, if your click-through rate is low, it shows that many prospective policyholders are seeing your ad without clicking on it. You can rectify that by creating compelling ad copies that persuade users to click. Track and improve your conversion rate, too. To improve this metric, create relevant landing pages for your insurance offerings. Make sure the content matches your target audiences’ search intent and includes appropriate CTAs to drive policy sales.
Achieve Awesome Results in Your Insurance PPC Campaigns with Stratosphere!
PPC campaigns can significantly increase your insurance agency’s marketing returns if done in the right manner. However, without the necessary resources, time, and a fully-equipped marketing team, many independent insurance agents are unable to justify their paid ads spend. This is where we come in! At Stratosphere, we have been consistently delivering outstanding results for PPC campaigns of our hundreds of insurance clients that we run for them. Our experienced paid marketing team is well-versed in all the nuances of insurance advertising, with a track record of excellence in high-ROI campaigns. Contact us today to get started!
