A contractor searches "commercial auto insurance" for his three work trucks. Two agencies show up. One ad says "Commercial Auto Insurance for Contractors" and opens a page about fleet and work-truck coverage with a short quote form. The other ad says "Your Neighborhood Insurance Team" and opens a home page with a carousel of carrier logos and a menu of fourteen products.
It's easy to assume the higher bid decides which ad shows first. Google says otherwise. Google's auction scores both ads, and the pages behind them, against the contractor's exact words, and the bid is only part of that score. The first agency can show above the second and pay less to do it.
For an agency that sells auto, home, life, renters, umbrella and a handful of commercial lines, that has one practical meaning: every line needs its own ad group, its own ads and its own page. This chapter explains why, using what Google publishes about its auction and what we found on eleven agency and agent sites advertising in our example market, the Cleveland-Akron area, one of them a national life agency.
Google Re-Ranks Every Insurance Ad at Every Search. The Biggest Bid Doesn't Automatically Win.
Each search starts a fresh auction. Google gives every eligible ad a score it calls Ad Rank, and those scores set who shows and in which spot. Google's help page lists what goes into it:
- Your bid. Your ceiling for one click.
- Ad and landing page quality, scored fresh in each auction.
- Ad Rank thresholds, a floor below which an ad doesn't appear.
- How competitive the auction is. When two ads land close together, the gap matters.
- The searcher's context: where they are, the device, the time and the words they typed.
- The expected impact of assets and other ad formats, such as call assets and sitelinks.
You'll find agency blogs teaching a neat formula, bid times Quality Score. Google doesn't publish one, and we don't teach one. What Google does put in writing is that better-quality ads tend to pay less per click. Quality is the factor an agency can improve most without spending more.
The spot matters too. In our experience, the top one or two ads on an insurance search collect most of its clicks, and earning that spot with relevance costs less than buying it. That's how a small agency stays in auctions where carriers outspend it.
Quality Score Is a 1-to-10 Report Card, Not a Price. Google Keeps It Out of the Auction.
Inside the account, each keyword carries a 1-to-10 Quality Score, and plenty of agencies chase that number. Google is blunt about it: the number never enters the auction that sets your price. It exists to show you what's broken.
It breaks into three parts, and each one points at something you can fix:
- Expected click-through rate. Google's estimate of whether people will click your ad for that keyword. Google adjusts this one so that position and add-ons don't count. Outbidding a rival or bolting on more sitelinks leaves it where it was. A headline that matches the search will.
- Ad relevance. Whether the ad talks about what the searcher typed.
- Landing page experience. Whether the page that opens helps the person who clicked.
Look at the three parts on your keywords, not the single number. A keyword rated "below average" on ad relevance needs a better-matched ad group. One rated "below average" on landing page experience needs a better page.
A "Commercial Auto Insurance" Search Deserves a Commercial Auto Ad. One "Insurance Services" Ad Group Matches Nothing Well.
Of the three, ad relevance is the cheapest to fix, yet agency accounts are often built to fail it. An agency sells many products. The temptation is one campaign with one ad group called something like "Insurance," holding car, home, life and business keywords, all sharing the same ads.
The sites we checked show how wide the menu runs. Ten of the eleven sell personal lines, ten sell life, nine sell commercial coverage and seven list health insurance. A single ad can't speak to a renter, a contractor and a family shopping for term life at once. So it fits none of them well, and ad relevance suffers across the group.
Split the account by line instead: a few closely related keywords per group, with ads that name that line:
- Auto: car insurance quotes, auto insurance near me.
- Home: homeowners insurance quote, home insurance near me.
- Renters and umbrella, each in its own group.
- Commercial lines, split by product: business owner's policy, general liability, workers comp, commercial auto.
- Life: term life insurance, life insurance quote.
Then write each group's ads in that line's words. A commercial auto group's headlines say commercial auto, work trucks and fleets. A renters group's say renters insurance and what it covers. Repeating the line in the headline isn't clumsy. It's the clearest signal of relevance an ad can send, to the searcher and to Google.
Niche coverage needs the same treatment. One multi-office agency in our sample ran ads for two niche programs, and neither had a matching page anywhere on its site. Wherever those clicks landed, the site had no page about what the searcher asked for.
Five of 11 Agency Sites We Checked Run Separate Quote Forms by Line or Product. That Form Is Where the Ad Should Land.
Then there's what the click opens. Five of the eleven sites we checked already run separate quote forms for different lines, from three forms to twelve. The other six use one form, or one widget with a product menu, for every line.
A line-specific page with its own form helps twice. Google sees a page about the thing the person searched for. The visitor sees a form asking the questions that fit, instead of a generic one, or one that asks for the wrong things. The first screens of the forms we checked ran from a single field to about thirty, and one personal auto form required a company name.
The pattern is simple:
- Auto ad group lands on the auto page, with the auto quote form near the top.
- Home ad group lands on the home page, with its form.
- Each commercial product lands on its own page.
If your site has only one general page per line, build the missing pages before you buy the clicks. A page that matches the search is cheaper than the extra bid it takes to win without one.
7 of 11 Agencies We Checked Advertised a Promise Their Own Site Didn't Make. The Page Has to Back Up the Ad.
A landing page also has to keep the ad's promises. In our sample, seven of the eleven agencies had at least one ad claim that their own site left out or contradicted. A few of the patterns, with the agencies left unnamed:
- An ad promised "A+ rated insurers"; the site said "A rated or higher."
- An ad promised round-the-clock service; the site offered an online portal.
- The years in business in one agency's ads matched one page and conflicted with two others.
- A location ad still showed an address the agency had left years earlier.
Each one is small. Together they tell a searcher, and Google, that the ad and the page weren't written for each other. Before an ad goes live, open the page it points to and find every claim in the ad on that page. If a claim isn't there, change the ad or the page.
10 of 11 Agency Home Pages Took Over 4 Seconds to Load on a Phone in Our Test. A Slow Page Wastes the Click.
Speed is part of the page's experience too, and most of the sites we checked were slow on a phone. We ran each home page through Google's PageSpeed Insights mobile test once. Ten of the eleven needed more than four seconds before their main content was visible. The slowest took over sixteen.
One test run is a single measurement, and your landing page may load faster than your home page. That's the point: test the page each ad actually points to, not the home page, and test it on a phone. In our experience, carrier-logo carousels, chat widgets and video backgrounds are common culprits. A driver comparing quotes at a red light won't wait for them.
Fixing it is usually unglamorous: compress the photos, drop the carousel from landing pages, load the chat widget after the page appears, and keep the quote form near the top so it shows first. Then rerun the test and compare.
A slow page doesn't just lose impatient visitors. In our experience, it also drags down how Google rates your landing page experience.
Next: GEICO and Progressive Searches Outnumber "Insurance Agency" 50 to 1. Keep Carrier Names Out of Your Keywords.
With an ad group and a page for each line, the account is ready for keywords. Chapter 5 builds the keyword list from rival agencies' sites, and explains why carrier names, which dominate that list, stay out of your campaigns. Earlier chapters cover tracking the bound policy, where the quote shoppers are and what a client is worth. Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
Our Google Ads management builds the ad groups and the pages together for agencies that would rather hand it off. Doing it yourself? Open your account's Keywords view, add the Quality Score columns, including landing page experience, and sort by it.
