Insurance PPC Agency Built for Policy Conversions

Q: Can a small insurance broker compete with GoCompare on Google Ads?

No, not on head terms. Their per-policy economics rely on aggregating volume across thousands of brokers - a per-bind cost that any single broker can't match without burning capital. The right play is to stop competing on their terms entirely. Find specialist commercial queries comparison sites don't target - niche policy types, specific trade verticals, geographic-led commercial broker queries - where your higher policy values, better conversion rates, and direct relationships make the unit economics work in your favour. Most successful insurance broker PPC accounts we run have under 10% spend exposure to head terms; the rest is specialist commercial volume that comparison sites are structurally bad at serving.

Q: What does "specialist commercial" actually mean for PPC?

Niche policy types and specific buyer contexts where comparison sites are necessarily generic. Examples: cyber insurance for SMEs in regulated sectors, professional indemnity tailored by trade ('PI for IT consultants', 'PI for surveyors'), contingent business interruption for manufacturing, marine cargo, fine art and high-net-worth household, charity trustee indemnity, contractor combined for specific construction trades. Plus geographic-led commercial broker queries ('commercial insurance broker [city]') where local trust beats price aggregation. Both have lower search volume than head terms, but radically better conversion economics - usually 2-4x higher quote-to-bind rates and 30-50% higher average policy values, which is what makes the lower volume profitable.

Q: How do FCA rules change ad copy?

ICOBS rules apply to comparison claims (no unsubstantiated 'cheapest' or 'best' superlatives), exclusion transparency (material exclusions can't be buried in 8pt landing-page footnotes), vulnerable customer treatment (some product types require additional content disclosures), and cooling-off period communication. IDD adds further requirements around demands-and-needs assessment for insurance-mediation activity. Most insurance ad disapprovals on Google stem from these rules - Google's enforcement layer often catches what compliance review missed. We pre-flight ad copy with your compliance lead at brief stage so the back-and-forth with Google's policy review is minimal, and so disapprovals don't pause your campaigns mid-flight when bind data is most useful.

Q: How fast can a specialist insurance PPC campaign go live?

Three weeks from scoping to launch on a clean account, assuming your policy admin system data access is straightforward. Week 1: account access, FCA / ICOBS compliance pre-flight, keyword strategy by sub-sector, smart-bidding strategy. Week 2: campaign build, landing-page review for ICOBS and IDD compliance, conversion tracking setup, offline-conversion API integration with your policy management system. Week 3: launch, optimisation, first reporting cadence. Bound-policy data starts flowing into smart bidding by week 6, and the algorithm reaches efficiency on bound-policy bidding by week 10-12. Slower than a generic Google Ads campaign because the compliance layer takes real review time.

Q: How do you measure cost per bound policy if our policy admin is on Acturis or Open GI?

Offline conversion uploads from your policy admin system back into Google Ads. Acturis, Open GI, SSP, Applied Epic - we've integrated with all of them via either direct API where available or scheduled CSV exports where it's not. Bound policies, renewals, and claims-related events become Google Ads conversion events with appropriate values (gross written premium per bind), so smart bidding optimises against actual revenue rather than form fills. The lag is typically 7-28 days from quote to bind, so the smart-bidding feedback loop runs slower than a typical eCommerce account, but the quality of the signal is much higher.