An agency that sells both renters and homeowners policies is running two different businesses through one ad account. A renters policy carries a small premium. A homeowners policy carries a bigger one, often comes bundled with the family's cars, and bundled home policies are more likely to renew, as Chapter 3 showed. Advertisers know it, and Google's Keyword Planner shows the gap: a top-of-page spot on "home insurance quote" is estimated at $50 to $164, while "renters insurance" runs $14 to $36.
Put both in one ad group with one bid and something breaks. Bid for homes and you overpay for every renter. Bid for renters and you never show for homes.
This chapter covers how we bid an agency account in its first months: by hand, line by line, from what a client is worth, watching where the ads actually show and who they're up against. Then it covers how those numbers hand off to Google's automated bidding once broad match joins.
Manual Bids Set Ad Group by Ad Group Keep a $36 Renters Search From Paying a $164 Home Price.
Isolation, our name for the launch campaign, runs on manual cost-per-click bidding, with each ad group carrying its own maximum bid. That's why Chapter 4 split the account by line. Each line gets a bid that fits what its clients are worth and what its auction costs.
Keyword Planner's national range for a top spot, line by line:
- Home insurance quote, $50.09 at the low end, $164.25 at the high end
- Auto insurance, $42.51 at the low end, $139.30 at the high end
- Business insurance, $28.00 at the low end, $95.71 at the high end
- Insurance agency near me, $9.22 at the low end, $41.08 at the high end
- Renters insurance, $13.91 at the low end, $36.36 at the high end
- Medicare advantage plans, $3.02 at the low end, $25.00 at the high end
Treat those as a map, not a price list. Keyword Planner builds the range from past auctions, and in our experience what you actually pay lands within about 30% of it either way. Your market can sit well above or below the national figure. In our example market, Cleveland-Akron, the estimate for "home insurance quote" ran $84.50 to $218.73, above the national range.
Why manual at the start? Because a new account has no conversion history, and automated bidding has nothing to learn from. Manual bids let you spend where you've decided a click is worth it, and they give you clean numbers about what each line really costs. Those numbers are what the automated strategy uses later.
Where inside each range should the first bid go? In the first weeks, an agency's new account has no track record with Google, so lean toward your ceiling and come down as the home, auto and renters groups earn better Quality Scores. The ceiling comes from the arithmetic below. If it lands below the range's low end, don't force the bid up; put that budget on cheaper searches in the same line. Then let the next section's columns tell you where to move. Brand keywords, your agency's own name, usually need the smallest bids of all, because few other advertisers compete for them and your ad is the most relevant answer.
An Agency's Highest Safe Bid Comes From What a Client Is Worth, Worked Backward Through the Close Rate.
Chapter 3 built the chain from click to client. Bidding runs it backward. Begin at the client end. Decide the most a new client on that line is worth paying for, then divide your way down to a click.
Here's the arithmetic, with example numbers chosen to show the steps, not benchmarks for your agency:
- Ceiling per client. Say a new homeowners household, with its auto policy, is worth enough over the years that you'll pay up to $900 to win one.
- Times your close rate. If one in four home quote requests binds, the most you can pay per lead is $900 x 25% = $225.
- Times your conversion rate. If 6 in 100 clicks turn into a quote request or a genuine call, a click can be worth up to $225 x 6% = $13.50.
Now compare that $13.50 with the top-of-page estimate for "home insurance quote." On the biggest quote searches, an agency's math often lands well below what carriers bid for the top spot. That's not a reason to quit. It's the reason Chapter 2 starts at the bottom of the funnel, where "insurance agency near me" and "independent insurance agent" cost a fraction as much. It's also why the close rate is worth fighting for: double it, and the safe bid doubles with it.
Run the arithmetic for each line on its own. A commercial package and a renters policy shouldn't share a ceiling, so they shouldn't share a bid.
The Searches That Bind Policies Deserve the Top of the Page. The Rest Can Live Lower Down or Not at All.
Once ads are running, four columns tell you where you stand. Turn these on in the keywords view:
- Search top impression share. Out of every chance your ad had, the share of times it appeared in the top block above the results.
- Search absolute top impression share. Of the searches where your ad was eligible for the top block, the share where it landed first.
- Search lost impression share (rank). The share of chances lost because Ad Rank fell short.
- Quality Score, with its three parts from Chapter 4.
For the keywords that actually bind policies, we aim for top impression share between 75 and 90 percent. Below that, you're missing searches you've proven are worth buying. In our experience, the last few points toward a full share cost far more than they return.
The other keywords don't need that. A search that sends quote requests but rarely binds can sit lower on the page at a lower bid, or be paused. Raise bids where the ad's below target and the close rate says the click is still profitable. If lost impression share from rank is high, look at Quality Score before reaching for the bid. A better ad or page often wins the position for less.
Auction Insights Shows Which Carriers Share Your Auctions. Some Auctions Cost More Than a Client Is Worth.
Auction insights lists the other advertisers appearing alongside you, by keyword or by ad group. Its numbers include each rival's impression share, how often your ads and theirs appear together, and how often theirs ranks above yours.
For an agency, the names in that report are usually predictable. When we checked Google's Ads Transparency Center, 12 of 15 major carriers and 9 of 16 lead sellers and comparison sites had run Search ads in the US in the previous 90 days. On a broad quote search, those are the advertisers you're bidding against, and many have budgets no agency can match.
Use the report to decide which fights to pick. If a carrier sits above you on nearly every impression of "car insurance quotes" and your bid already exceeds your ceiling, that auction costs more than a client is worth. Bring the bid down or pause it, and spend that money where carriers crowd in less and the searcher wants someone local: agency searches, a line plus your town, the commercial searches where local agencies already compete for less.
Google Turns Call Recording Off by Default for Financial Services. Listening to Your Own Calls Becomes Your Job.
Back in Chapter 1, the call recording rule came up: Google leaves recording off by default for advertisers it files under financial services, and an agency probably lands there. You can turn it on by hand; until you do, Google's call conversions fall back on call length, which we set at 30 seconds.
Call length doesn't tell you what the call was. A 45-second call can be a new quote request, a current client asking for an ID card, or a wrong number that took a while to sort out. Bids built on calls need someone checking which is which.
Review a sample of ad calls every week, through your phone system's logs or a third-party call tracker if you use one:
- New quote requests are what the bids are buying.
- Existing clients calling the number in your ad suggest a brand campaign or ad copy that's reaching current customers.
- Wrong numbers and spam that cleared 30 seconds suggest a call-length setting worth revisiting.
That review feeds your close rate, and your close rate feeds every bid in this chapter. Count the calls that turned into quotes, then the quotes that bound, and update the numbers behind each ad group's ceiling once a month.
A Target CPA Picked From Thin Air Starves Broad Match. Your Exact Match Clients Already Proved the Real Cost.
Exploration, Chapter 6's broad match campaign, starts once roughly 30 quality conversions come in each month, which for most accounts is month two or three, and its Maximize Conversions bidding follows a target cost per acquisition. In newer versions of the interface, Google labels that setup simply Target CPA.
The target comes from Isolation's real numbers. Google's own suggestion is a target built from the past 30 days' average cost per conversion, and it cautions that setting the target too low can mean fewer conversions, not cheaper ones. A target an owner wishes were true, rather than one the account has proven, is the fastest way to starve a new broad match campaign.
So pull Isolation's cost per conversion for the lines Exploration covers, set the target near it, and leave it alone long enough to learn. Adjust it in modest steps once the campaign has a month of its own data. If Exploration's cost per client drifts above the ceiling from the arithmetic earlier in this chapter, the target comes down or the campaign narrows.
Next: Carriers Advertise Savings. Reviews Praise the Agent Who Shopped the Policy. Put the Shopping in Your Headline.
With bids set by line and checked against what clients are worth, the ads themselves are next. Chapter 8 writes them from what customers say in reviews. Earlier chapters cover what a client is worth, a page for every line and exact match before broad. Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
Our Google Ads management handles bids line by line for agencies that would rather not. Doing it yourself? Add the top impression share column to your keywords view and see which of your best searches sit below 75%.
