Insurance-related keywords often cost between £10 and £30 per click. When you're investing that much into your PPC, you want to be generating quality leads.
In this guide, insurance marketers will learn how to optimise their PPC performance by bidding on high-intent searches for niche products, building consumer trust with educational materials and tracking conversions across the user journey. Whilst complying with the strict regulations financial services and insurance organisations have to follow.
To keep this guide digestible, we'll focus on Google Ads rather than paid social and other search engine PPC offerings. From working with insurance companies to accelerate their PPC, we've found Google Ads to be the most effective when it comes to growing awareness, interest and conversion.
With that being said, if you would like to find out whether paid social is a good option for your insurance business, reach out to our digital marketing team for a chat.
The Biggest Mistakes We See in Insurance Google Ads Campaigns
In today's digital world, most people have a vague understanding of how Google Ads works. You create ads, find keywords relevant to your business or product offering, and then bid for them. Google is pretty great at supporting you with optimisations, labelling landing pages and ad assets from poor to excellent quality with recommendations to improve.
But what if I told you getting all of your ad assets to an excellent score wouldn't guarantee quality lead generation?
There's something even more important than finding the right keywords and optimising your ad creative. And, from our experience, one that many insurance companies overlook.
Here are the mistakes we see insurance brokers make time and time again:
- No custom audience targeting
- Broken conversion tracking
- Tracking the wrong KPIs
- Missing two-thirds of the user journey
- Treating PPC like the whole marketing strategy
- Poor landing page optimisation
- Compliance brought in too late
No Custom Target Audience Segments
One of the most common mistakes we see when we're working with organisations in the insurance industry is broad audience targeting. This is because everyone needs insurance. Of course they do. There's no demographic-sized box that someone needing life cover or mortgage protection fits into. So the ads get served to the masses and we see what comes back.
The problem with this is when you're targeting a broad audience, you're wasting a lot of your marketing budget on irrelevant impressions. Some of the people that see your ad will request a quote. But most of them will scroll past to find what they actually came to the search engines looking for.
Think of it like a fisherman casting his net far and wide, hoping there are fish underneath the boat. He might catch something, but around the corner is another fisherman who knows exactly where the right fish are. He uses less energy, wastes less time and brings back the catch people actually want.
The point is, if all of your ad spend is being thrown at a mass audience, you can't guarantee high-intent leads. Insurance advertising is already a highly competitive space, the one advantage you have is a deep understanding of your target customer.
Broken Conversion Tracking Hiding Wins and Losses
It sounds obvious, but getting your conversion tracking right at the start is the easiest way to get a competitive advantage. Admittedly, this isn't unique to the insurance industry. We see so many PPC campaigns being butchered by poorly managed tracking.
Without accurate conversion insights, you can't adapt your PPC strategies or optimise bidding tactics based on your data. You're basically guessing.
The difference, when it comes to insurance marketing, is how difficult this can be. Tracking clicks and form submissions is one thing, but being able to see the user journey from first touch to policy decision is another.
That's why we've got a team of data scientists and digital experience platform experts on hand. We've helped our financial services and insurance clients demonstrate measurable ROI despite the unique challenges they face.
Insurance Companies Tracking the Wrong KPIs for Their Digital Strategy
This is a great follow-on from the previous section, because if your conversion tracking isn't set up correctly then the KPIs you're tracking definitely won't be right. Many insurance advertisers come to us with the same set of data. They're tracking clicks, conversions (usually form submissions), CTRs, CPAs, impressions. It sounds like all the right things.
Where insurance businesses get this wrong is they're not tracking success down the customer journey. PPC advertising, like any other form of digital marketing, can be placed into three categories:
- awareness
- engagement
- conversion
If you're tracking all three stages of the funnel under one PPC campaign, of course you should expect weak conversion rates. By the time you've got to the end of this guide, you'll have all the insights you need to launch channel-specific insurance PPC campaigns that focus on audience intent. That's when you're in a better position to track the right KPIs:
| Stage | Google Campaign Type | KPIs |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Demand Gen, Performance Max | Impressions, CPM, Impression Share, Absolute Top of Search Impression Share |
| Engagement | Performance Max, Paid Search | Clicks, CPC, Engagement Rate, Average Time per Session |
| Conversion | Paid Search | Conversion, Conversion Rate, Revenue |
Advertising Insurance Without Mapping Product Lines to Audience Intent
Another big insurance campaign performance killer we see is targeting the wrong intent. Every conversion starts at the top of a funnel somewhere. But for the financial services and insurance industry, that funnel is essential.
When it comes to insurance marketing, building trust with your audience is essential. And with growing digital use, your audience is smarter than ever before. You don't build trust by slapping a Trustpilot widget on your landing page in 2026.
In today's digital landscape, you build trust by becoming the organisation at the heart of every phase of the journey. When your customer is researching products, you must be there. When your customer is comparing products, you must be there. And when your customer is investigating brands and products, you must be there.
That means spreading your PPC advertising budget across every stage of audience intent. If you're only targeting keywords at the bottom of the funnel, you're not building trust with the right audience.
Some simple SEO keyword research can help you out here. Find relevant keywords that align with all the stages of this funnel and make sure your organisation is present throughout research, comparison, investigation and conversion.
Insurance Marketing that isn't Prioritising Channels by Policy Value
Advertising insurance products shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all approach. You know your product line, and you know where the value is.
But it's not just about managing your ad spend. It's about finding the right channels to get the results you want from your campaigns. The best part? Once you've defined your target audience and mapped each product to audience intent, you're already doing this.
Paid search advertising is one of the most expensive forms of PPC you can choose, but tends to convert at a higher rate. If you choose a CPC bidding strategy, you're targeting a set of keywords and paying every time someone clicks. That's great for an audience already at the bottom of the funnel. However it's an expensive mistake if the person that clicks is still researching their options.
To reach users at an awareness or engagement stage, try a cheaper campaign format such as Demand Gen.
PPC Becomes the Entire Digital Marketing Strategy
We used to put paid search in one bucket, and organic search, social media and digital PR in another. That's not going to cut it in the highly competitive insurance market.
Search engines are looking at a much bigger picture when it comes to what ads to serve. Your ad copy and creative make up a small part of what good insurance marketing looks like. Now, you have to think about your other digital marketing channels.
Remember, we're building an insurance company that users discover on the very first stage of their journey. You need to be the organisation producing the educational materials, so that you're positioned as a credible source from day one.
How's your website SEO? Do you have topical authority in this space? Are you talking about this product on social media? Do your paid social ads align with your Google ads? Are people raving about this product in the reviews?
All these metrics count towards your search visibility and impression share. That's why, when it comes to choosing a PPC partner, make sure they know what they're talking about when it comes to SEO as well.
Compliance Issues
Whilst not something insurance companies are likely to overlook, it can be frustrating trying to fit your PPC marketing to Google's ever-changing guidelines. And that's if you can get it approved by your internal compliance teams.
Insurance policies need to be clearly identified and visibly labelled as insurance products. You need to create compliance-safe ad copy to get your PPC campaigns seen in these highly competitive markets. As well as the FCA rules, such as prohibiting unsubstantiated claims in insurance marketing, you also have to complete Google's financial services verification which can take weeks.
Then you have internal compliance to deal with. Google builds custom ads by putting the different variations of your ad copy or image assets together. Whilst you can pin headlines in certain positions, it's difficult to get a grasp of what every possible ad combination might look like. Furthermore, if you're running performance max or demand gen campaigns you have very little control over placement.
As a financial services and insurance marketing agency, Appius have been able to manoeuvre these complex compliance issues in ways that most agencies haven't had to deal with. We ensure insurance marketing campaigns meet compliance requirements whilst delivering qualified leads through smart bidding and expert keyword targeting.
Poor Quality Landing Page Experience
Before you've put your insurance PPC campaign live, Google's checking your landing page quality score. Once it's live, Google's checking engagement metrics to make sure users are having a great experience when they get there.
First and foremost, optimise the technical health of your landing page. Use an SEO tool to scan the page and get technical recommendations. Use Lighthouse and Google Search Console to check that the page can be crawled properly, loads quickly and isn't going to make the user bounce straight to another insurance agencies website.
Add price comparison at the top of the page so that the user can see the information they're actually there for. Use personalisation to include geographic targeting into your paid media campaigns. If your goal is lead gen, or you're trying to get users to submit quote requests, tell them at the begging. You should only have one clear CTA in your strategy, not multiple options that confuse users.
What Realistic Insurance PPC Looks Like
With pay per click, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad, so you want to make sure your budgets, optimisation strategy and paid media assets are all working to achieve your KPIs.
For insurance brokers, we wouldn't recommend running any PPC activity without a £1,000+ monthly budget. It's an extremely competitive niche, and that comes with expensive keyword targeting.
We usually see successful insurance PPC campaigns returning around 3-5x ad spend. But high-intent searches for niche products tend to outperform generic terms. In some cases, we've seen specialist commercial queries yielding 4X higher conversion rates than generic insurance marketing targets.
Final Thoughts for Insurance Brokers
Insurance PPC is expensive. There’s no getting around that. But wasted spend usually doesn’t come from high CPCs alone. It comes from sending the wrong message to the wrong audience at the wrong stage of the journey.
If you’re an insurance broker investing in Google Ads, here’s what you need to remember:
Don’t target everyone just because everyone needs insurance. Broad targeting might get your ads seen, but visibility doesn’t pay the bills. You need to focus your budget on the people most likely to need the specific policies you offer.
Track the full journey, not just the first form fill. A quote request is useful, but it doesn’t tell you whether that lead became a policyholder. Better conversion tracking helps you understand which campaigns are actually driving revenue.
Match your campaigns to audience intent. Someone researching life insurance is not in the same mindset as someone searching for “income protection broker near me”. Treating those users the same is how budgets disappear.
Use PPC as part of the funnel, not the whole thing. Paid search works harder when it’s supported by SEO, useful content, reviews, social proof and educational materials that build trust before the conversion moment.
Prioritise budget by policy value. Not every insurance product needs the same PPC strategy. Higher-value policies can justify more competitive paid search activity, while lower-value or early-stage products may be better supported through awareness-led campaigns.
Get compliance involved early. Insurance ads need to be clear, accurate and approved. Building compliance into your PPC process from the start saves time, protects your brand and helps avoid delays when campaigns are ready to launch.
Optimise the landing page before you optimise the campaign. If your page is slow, confusing or asking users to do too many things, even the best ad strategy will struggle. Keep the journey simple, build trust quickly and make the next step obvious.
The brokers that win with PPC are not always the ones spending the most. They’re the ones spending with the most intent.
About Author
