Picture an agency in Youngstown, Ohio, a few miles from the Pennsylvania line. Its producers hold Ohio licenses only. Its first Google Ads campaign goes live with the location set to "Youngstown" and every other setting left as Google suggested.
Within a week, those ads can show to people in western Pennsylvania who searched for an agent in Youngstown, and to someone in Florida who once looked up insurance in Youngstown. Some of them will ask for quotes.
That's not just wasted budget. In some states, advertising itself is tied to the insurance license. This chapter covers the settings we change before an agency's first click, starting with the one that decides where its ads are allowed to show.
Florida, Texas and California Tie Advertising to the License. A Search Ad Offering Quotes Can Read as Solicitation.
Every state requires a license to sell insurance. Several go further and name advertising itself, or soliciting, as something only a licensed agent may do. A few of them, side by side:
- Florida. No person may "act as, or advertise or hold himself or herself out to be an insurance agent" unless licensed and appointed (Stat. 626.112).
- Texas. A person acts as an insurer's agent if the person "advertises or otherwise gives notice that the person will receive or transmit an application for insurance" (Ins. Code 4001.051).
- California. To "transact" insurance includes "Solicitation" (Ins. Code 35), and transacting requires a license.
- Illinois and Ohio require a license to "sell, solicit or negotiate" insurance, and New York bars anyone from acting as an insurance producer without one.
Our reading, and it's only that, not legal advice: a Google ad that offers home insurance quotes is solicitation. Showing it in a state where nobody at the agency holds a license for that line is an exposure, not just a wasted click. Licenses are also issued line by line, so a producer licensed for property and casualty but not life shouldn't run life ads in that state.
The fix is simple to say. Set the campaign's locations to the states where the agency and the producers who will answer the leads hold licenses for the line in each ad group. If you hold a nonresident license in a neighboring state, that state can go on the map. If you don't, it stays off. The same goes line by line: an agency licensed for home and auto in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but for life only in Ohio, needs the life ad group in a campaign that targets Ohio alone. Location is a campaign setting, so lines with different license maps belong in different campaigns.
Google's Default Location Setting Reaches People Who Only Showed Interest. Presence Keeps an Agency's Ads Inside Its Licensed States.
Choosing a state isn't the whole setting. Google also asks how to read "people in this place," and its default is the wider answer.
Google's help page describes two options:
- Presence or interest, the default. It reaches people likely to be in or regularly in your locations, plus people who have shown interest in them.
- Presence. It drops the interest part and keeps the ad to people Google places in, or routinely in, the states the agency picked.
Under the default, a person in Erie, Pennsylvania, who searches for an agent in Cleveland can see an Ohio agency's ad. So can someone in Arizona researching a move to Akron. Neither is in a state the agency is licensed in.
Google's help page names two cases where Presence is the better choice: a business in a sensitive category with tight targeting limits, and a business that wants to reach only people in specific places. A licensed agency fits the second case, since it can sell only in the states where it holds a license. We set every agency campaign to Presence.
Two limits are worth knowing. Presence still counts people "regularly located" in your area, so a commuter who lives in Pennsylvania and works in Youngstown can see the ad. And Google says its location targeting is a best effort, with "100% accuracy" not guaranteed. So the landing page should say plainly which states you write policies in, and the form should ask for the property's state or the driver's address before a quote goes out.
Search Partners Put Insurance Ads on Sites You Can't See, Before the Account Knows What a Good Click Costs.
The next setting is the network. A new Search campaign includes Google's search partners: other websites that show Google search ads, along with YouTube search results. Google charges only for clicks there, the same as on Google Search.
The trouble is visibility. You can't pick which partner sites carry the ad, and a brand-new account has no history to tell a good partner click from a bad one. In our experience, partner traffic is where bot clicks and accidental taps show up first, and an agency paying $20 or more for a quote click feels each one.
We switch search partners off for Isolation, the exact match launch campaign, and leave the Display Network off too. After a few months of quote requests and bound policies, an agency can trial partners in a split test and keep them only if their quotes bind at the same rate. Until then, every click comes from a Google search you can read in the search terms report.
AI Max Arrives Switched On, and the Insurance Ad Text It Writes Can Say "Free" in States That Restrict the Word.
Build a new Search campaign today and Google ticks the AI Max box for you. AI Max widens matching beyond your keywords and can rewrite your ads with text it generates from your site.
There's a second route in. A setting once called automatically created assets, now called text customization, lets Google write headlines from your website. From September 2026, Google is moving every campaign that still uses that setting into AI Max on its own.
For an insurance agency, generated text carries a specific risk. Several states restrict the word "free" in insurance ads:
- Texas bars "free," "no cost" and similar words in ads for life, annuity and health products (Ins. Code 1702.052).
- Florida bars life and health agents from using "free," "no cost" or similar words in an ad (626.9541).
- Ohio bars calling insurance "free" or "no cost" in an ad when it's offered as an inducement to buy another policy (3901.21).
- New York bars those words for benefits and services offered with a life policy (11 NYCRR 219.4).
These rules mainly cover life and health ads, so the risk is highest for agencies that sell those lines. Still, a headline Google writes from your site can't check your state's rules. Chapter 8's headlines were built from your clients' words for a reason: you know what each one promises.
So AI Max comes off when we build the campaign, and text customization comes off with it. Broad match also stays off in Isolation; Chapter 6 covers when broad match joins. We test AI Max last in an agency account, after the exact and broad match campaigns have shown which quote searches end in bound policies. If you ever turn it on, Google's text guidelines let you add messaging restrictions, and "free" belongs on that list.
Without Auto-Tagging and Call Reporting, the Bound Policy Never Finds Its Way Back to the Ad That Earned It.
Two settings go on before launch, and both serve Chapter 1's goal of sending bound policies back to Google.
Auto-tagging adds a click ID, called the GCLID, to the web address of every ad click. New accounts get it switched on automatically, according to Google, but an agency account that's been around for years may not have it, so look. That ID is how a quote request in your agency management system gets matched to the click that produced it. Without it, an offline import of bound policies has nothing to match against.
Call reporting swaps the agency's number in a call asset or call ad for a Google forwarding number. Google's call reporting page says the forwarding number lets you track each call's duration and count calls of a set length as conversions, which is how a 30-second call counts. Google recommends turning it on when you add call assets. For an agency that gets most of its new business by phone, this is the setting that makes calls visible at all.
Searches for Your Agency's Name Are Its Cheapest Clicks. Clients Hunting for the Login Page Are Its Most Wasted.
Searches for your agency by name are the cheapest, most likely clicks in the account. Few rivals bid on them, and the searcher already knows who you are. We give them a campaign of their own, separate from Isolation, so their low cost and high conversion rate don't flatter the numbers for the searches you're actually trying to win.
That campaign needs negatives from day one. Clients search your name to pay a bill, print an ID card or log in to a portal. Add "login," "sign in," "portal," "pay bill" and "ID card" as negative keywords in the brand campaign, so you aren't paying to send current clients to a page they could have reached for free.
One state rule touches the brand campaign too. In Texas, an ad must identify who is responsible for it, and for ads about coverage in general, the agency's full licensed name, its registered assumed name or the agent's license number is enough (28 TAC 21.104). An ad describing a specific carrier's policy must name the insurer. The business name Google shows in your ads should match one of those, not a nickname the agency goes by.
Next: Independent Agencies Average $20,600 a Year on Marketing. Google Won't Aim Ads at Your Client List Until $50,000.
With the campaign set to the licensed footprint and the defaults switched off, the account is ready to spend. Chapter 10 covers the budget and what an agency's client list can and can't do in Google Ads. Earlier chapters cover tracking bound policies, exact match before broad and headlines from reviews. Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
Our Google Ads management builds agency campaigns to match their licenses. Doing it yourself? Open your campaign's location options today and check whether it says Presence.
