PPC for insurance: 13 tips for getting big results

Insurance is a numbers game. Fine margins can make a massive difference. Used correctly, pay per click advertising can help you win new customers and drive predictable revenue, week after week, month after month.

Here are 13 expert tips to help you win with PPC for insurance.

We price on performance

Before we start, let us introduce ourselves. We’re Adbetter – an award-winning pay per click agency. Lead generation for financial services is one of the areas we specialise in. 

And we’re so confident in our ability that our fees are tied to the qualified leads we deliver. 

We win when you do. 

So if you want to skip to the part where your pay per click campaigns are set up and driving revenue for your business, get in touch to arrange a quick strategy call. 

Need more convincing? Browse our case studies.

“We outsourced our entire digital strategy to the Adbetter team, and since the start they’ve been much more than an external agency partner. With an analytical mindset and very knowledgeable across all digital channels, the team really complements each other with their expertise, and helped us straight away to put together a mature digital brand & acquisition strategy. No challenge is too big and their data-driven approach has been key in getting our campaigns off the ground.”

– Aline Ungewiss, CMO, Milltech

1. Be aware of the red tape

Let’s start with the boring bit – albeit something you’ll be all too familiar with as an insurance business: regulations.

Pay per click platforms are extremely strict about the promotion of financial services – and that includes insurance.

There are numerous hoops to jump through as an advertiser. And if your ads fail to hit the mark they will most likely be blocked. You could even find yourself banned from publishing future campaigns.

And of course, the platform regulations are just the start. There are also the rules from the ASA and FCA to comply with too.

It’s why the best place to start with any PPC for insurance campaign is to bone up on the regulatory landscape.

Without a firm grasp of the rules, you could fall at the first hurdle – potentially wasting a lot of time and money creating campaigns that are immediately blocked.

2. Pick the right platform

The majority of pay per click campaigns we work on are published on either Google Search, the Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram) or both.

With most insurance campaigns, you’re going to be targeting Google Search as your priority to capture demand at the moment people are searching for cover.

However, there are clever ways you can use the Meta channels – and potentially save yourself a lot of money in the process.

More on that shortly.

3. Niche down

You don’t need us to tell you that insurance is a highly competitive market. No matter your area of specialism, you have some serious competition.

That makes it hard to capture audience attention. And to make things even harder, there’s the fact that people have a lot of inertia when it comes to insurance.

Buying a policy isn’t something people tend to get excited about. It’s a chore. They would rather have it off their plate in as little time as possible.

There’s a lot for you to contend with if you want to cut through. And that’s before we’ve even mentioned finding a way to compete with the major aggregators.

The answer? Niche down.

For each campaign, focus on one area of insurance that you specialise in. 

Explain what makes you experts.
Lead on policy benefits that most others don’t have.
Bring out the things that make your brand and your cover unique.

4. Be prepared to spend

Cost per click tends to be relatively high in the insurance sector. That’s because winning a new customer can be so lucrative in terms of lifetime value. 

It’s fair to say that if you want to drive significant returns from pay per click advertising, you should be prepared to spend.

That might also mean being prepared to play the long game. 

Let’s say you sell contents insurance. You may need to accept that you will make a loss on each new customer’s first year of premium. The returns come in year two and beyond if/when the policy renewals come.

That’s why it’s so important that you…

5. Know your numbers

They say there’s strength in numbers. That’s particularly true when it comes to running an insurance business.

Before any lucrative pay per click campaign, you must arm yourself with key data like average customer lifetime value and the cost of customer acquisition across various channels.

Only then can you bid accordingly for keywords and make sure your PPC campaigns are as profitable as possible.

6. Get your audience targeting right

Pay per click platforms give you a vast range of options when it comes to selecting an audience to serve your ads to.

You can target people based on age, location, occupation, hobbies, online browsing history and a huge amount of additional variables.

One shortcut for finding people who are likely to be interested in your policies?

Lookalike audiences (on Meta) and Customer Match (on Google).

Feed the platform your existing customer data and it will find people who share certain common denominators – such as age, occupation, hobbies and interests and so on.

7. Target your existing customers at renewal

It’s so important to your business that you encourage people to buy from you directly, rather than via aggregators.

You will likely have an automated email program that targets policyholders to renew with you directly when they are reaching the end of their cover.

But you can complement this activity with targeted campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok too.

Just feed your data into the ad platforms and create lists of policyholders coming up for renewal in each specific month.

It’s a great way to hit your audience on an unexpected channel with a highly relevant message – helping to keep your brand front of mind when they come to renew.

Added bonus? Insurance PPC campaigns tend to be far cheaper on the social media networks compared to Google search.

8. Target new customers (at renewal)

Your own policyholders aren’t the only ones you can target on social networks come renewal time. With a bit of thought, you can run a campaign that coaxes people from your competitors.

Let’s say you own a pet insurance company. You run a competition to win six months of pet food. To enter the competition, entrants must answer four questions.

1. What pet do you have?
2. Do you have pet insurance?
3. Who is your policy with?
4. When is your policy up for renewal?

Then you give people an incentive to opt in to receive marketing. As simple as that, you could end up with a couple of very useful audiences to market to:

1. People with pets who don’t currently have insurance
2. The policy renewal date of people who do have insurance

All from one competition.

9. Think about onward click

When someone clicks one of your ads, that’s just the start of the pay per click journey.

All subsequent steps in your sales funnel should be set up to follow on cogently – with landing pages and nurture emails that echo the messages from the initial ad that your lead clicked on.

It’s crucial to be cohesive.

10. Utilise social proof

If you have persuasive trust signals such as a five-star Defaqto rating or a high score on Trustpilot, those are excellent additions to your creative to quickly build trust and confidence in a cold target audience.

If you have recent customer reviews about a positive claims experience, use them.

11. Test, test, test

No matter what pay per click platform(s) you use, you will have the option to submit multiple variations of each ad campaign you work up. This is your opportunity to experiment with wording, images, headlines, descriptions and more.

The platform will automatically test these variations – before preferentially serving the variants that are most likely to drive the intended results for your business.

12. Track your leads through your sales funnel

For the really big wins with PPC for insurance, you need to track what happens throughout your sales funnel – from the moment someone clicks an ad to the moment they become a customer.This tracking can be fiddly to set up. (Although not if you use our proprietary software, Nerchr.)

But it’s the key to being able to track customer behaviour throughout your sales funnel.

And when you have that data, you can see how to optimise your campaigns to drive not just more leads, but more sales and revenue over time. Same ad spend, more revenue.

13. Consider working with an expert

Insurance is busy. You are already spread too thinly. So let an award-winning pay per click agency look after your campaigns.

We can take care of everything: getting your campaigns set up, published and optimised – with all post-click tracking and reporting in place. Then you can keep your campaigns ticking over yourself in our professional pay per click orchestration platform, Nerchr.

Alternatively, we can keep running your campaigns for you, with monthly dashboards and reports that show you exactly how our efforts are contributing to your revenue growth.

Sounds good? Get in touch to arrange a short strategy call. We will outline everything you can expect within three months of working with us.

Not sure? Take a look at our case studies. Or learn a little more about how we work.

You may also be interested in:

>> Financial services lead generation: how we help financial brands win qualified leads

>> Where to find the best leads for life insurance businesses

>> Leads for health insurance: how to win big with pay per click

>> Facebook marketing for insurance agents: key elements of success