A parent sits in the dealership's finance office while their seventeen-year-old waits by the new car. Before signing, they type into their phone: "car insurance for new drivers." Four thousand four hundred people a month type that exact phrase. Thousands more type their own version of it, from cheap car insurance for teens to the best insurance for new drivers.
No agency will ever list every one of those wordings. Nobody has to. Google Ads has a tool built to find the versions you didn't think of, and it's the same tool that will waste your budget if you turn it on too early.
This chapter is about the order. Open with exact match on the quote searches you can already name. Hold broad match back until the account has enough conversions to tell good situation searches from bad ones. Every volume below is a US monthly figure from Google's Keyword Planner.
Insurance Searches Follow Life Events. A New Car Alone Draws 9,900 a Month.
People rarely wake up wanting insurance. Something happens first, and the search describes it:
- A new car: "insurance for new car," 9,900 searches a month.
- A teenager behind the wheel: "car insurance for new drivers," 4,400.
- A rental property: "landlord insurance," 12,100, and "insurance for rental property," 3,600.
- A first house: "home insurance for first time buyers," 390.
- A fender bender: "car insurance after accident," 480.
- A new toy: "motorcycle insurance quote," 33,100, and "boat insurance quote," 5,400.
Each of those has dozens of cousins with smaller numbers. When we pulled Keyword Planner's related ideas for car and auto insurance, hundreds of them named no carrier, and about half of those drew fewer than 1,000 searches a month each. That long, thin tail is where the oddly specific situations live, one small search at a time. Keyword Planner only lists searches with measurable volume, so the real tail of one-off wordings runs longer still.
Some of those situations are worth naming at launch. If your agency writes a lot of landlord policies, "landlord insurance" and "rental property insurance" deserve an exact ad group and a landlord page of their own. If you write teen drivers for families you already insure, a new-driver group with a page that explains adding a teenager makes sense from day one. The rest of the tail waits for broad match. Whichever situations you name, send each one to a page that speaks to it, because Chapter 4's rule doesn't loosen for the long tail. A parent searching about a new driver should land on a page about adding a new driver, not on a general auto quote form.
Exact Match Buys the Quote Searches You Can Name, Plus Wordings Google Reads as the Same Request.
We call the launch campaign Isolation. It holds only the quote and agency searches you've seen turn into policies, each one in exact match, each bid typed in by you. Chapter 5 built that list.
Exact match is looser than it used to be, but it's still the tightest option. Google describes it as matching searches that mean the same thing or ask for the same thing as your keyword. Of the three matching options, it gives you the tightest control over who sees the ad and reaches the fewest searches. In practice, "car insurance quotes near me" may also match a close rewording like "car insurance quote nearby," but not a question like "why did my car insurance go up."
That narrowness is the point at launch. With no conversion history, the account has nothing to teach Google which searches are worth paying for. Exact match keeps the budget on searches you've already judged.
It also makes the first month readable. Every search term in the report maps back to a keyword you chose, so when a search sends calls that bind, you know exactly which one it was. That record becomes the seed list for everything that follows.
Broad Match Is Google's Default Setting. Left On at Launch, It Buys Searches That Don't Contain Your Keywords.
Broad match works the other way. Google's help page admits the stretch: a broad keyword can trigger your ad for a search that's only related to it, even one that doesn't mean quite the same thing. It's also the match type Google applies by default when you add a keyword without choosing one.
For an agency that's a real risk on day one. A broad keyword like car insurance quote can be matched to carrier logins, claims numbers, job searches and rate-increase questions, the very searches Chapter 5 kept out. Without conversion data, Google has no evidence yet about which related searches turn into bound policies at your agency, so it guesses. A broad "home insurance quote" keyword could wander into home warranty plans, homeowners association fees or mortgage questions, all of them related to a home, none of them a policy you can write.
Check every keyword's match type before launch. If a keyword doesn't show square brackets in the account, it isn't exact. Also check the campaign settings: Google Ads has a campaign setting that can turn all of a campaign's keywords into broad match. In Isolation, it stays off. Chapter 9 walks through that setting and the other launch defaults.
Broad Match Runs on Smart Bidding. We Wait for About 30 Quality Conversions a Month Before Turning It On.
Google is direct about how broad match is meant to run: it should be paired with Smart Bidding, and Google calls the pairing critical. Smart Bidding sets a bid for each search using signals at auction time, and it learns from your conversions. That's why broad match waits.
Target CPA can technically start with no history at all. But Google's own advice for judging a target CPA campaign is to look at a month of results holding 30 conversions or more, and we borrow that number for our gate. At roughly 30 quality conversions a month, the account has earned broad match. For most agencies that's usually two or three months in, and busier agencies get there sooner.
Exploration, the second campaign, gets built like this:
- Copy the Isolation campaign and seed it with three to five of its proven keywords, in broad match.
- Set Maximize Conversions with a target CPA equal to what Isolation's conversions have really cost. That target keeps broad match from overspending.
- Start every morning of the first month in the search terms report, blocking new wordings that don't fit. Chapter 5 covers that routine.
- Give it a month or two to train before judging it.
"Quality conversions" matters in that gate. A quality conversion for an agency is a real quote request or a call long enough to be a conversation, the actions Chapter 1 set up, not a page view or a click on a phone number. Thirty form fills from bots won't teach Smart Bidding anything useful. Thirty real quote requests a month will.
Exploration is where an agency account grows, because the situations people search for outnumber the quote phrases anyone could list.
Business Owners Search by Trade, From Contractors to Food Trucks. Broad Match Finds Trades You Never Listed.
Commercial searches work the same way, only the situations are trades. Contractors type "contractor insurance" 4,400 times a month, and advertisers are willing to pay real money for them: the estimate for a top spot reaches $93. "Food truck insurance" draws 1,600. "Insurance for small business owners" draws 590.
There are hundreds of trades, and each owner describes the business in their own words: landscaper, roofer, cleaning company, home bakery, mobile mechanic. An agency can't build an ad group for every one of them at launch. It can build groups for the products it writes, general liability, business owner's policies, workers comp and commercial auto, and let broad match connect those to the trades searching for them once the account has the data.
Trade searches that turn up in your reports and then bind policies graduate. They move into Isolation as exact keywords with ads of their own. Say a search like "insurance for a cleaning business" brings in two bound policies in a month. It doesn't need broad match to find it again. Add it in exact match, give it an ad that names cleaning businesses, and point it at the page that speaks to them. That's the loop: broad match finds, exact match locks in. Chapter 16 covers commercial lines in full.
Exact Match Doesn't Retire When Broad Match Starts. It Holds the Top Spot on the Quotes You Know Convert.
Once Exploration is running, the two campaigns trade weight over time. On some searches Exploration will win the clicks Isolation used to get, and if Exploration carries an ad group profitably, you can pause that part of Isolation.
The reverse happens too. If a search you know converts, like "home insurance agent near me," starts slipping down the page under broad match, turn the exact keyword back on in Isolation and bid for the position yourself. Exact match is how you hold the searches that matter most. Broad match is how you find the ones you didn't know about.
The signal to watch is impression share at the top of the page on your most valuable exact keywords. Chapter 7 explains how to read it. When it drops on a search that reliably binds policies, Isolation takes that search back.
Next: A Home Insurance Quote Click Can Reach $164. A Renters Click Tops Out Near $36. One Bid Can't Price Both.
With a launch list in exact match and a plan for broad match, the next question is what to bid on each search. Chapter 7 sets bids by hand, ad group by ad group, using the numbers from earlier chapters: what a client is worth and the keyword list. Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
Our Google Ads management runs this sequence for agencies, from the exact launch list to the daily search-term reads once broad match starts. Doing it yourself? Open your keywords and check the match type on every one before the next dollar goes out.
