Objectives
LifeSearch is an insurance brokerage specialising in life insurance, income protection, and critical illness cover, amongst other products. Since 1998, they have safeguarded over three-quarters of a million UK families and businesses. They take pride in their commitment to selecting the most suitable cover for you and your family.
Their key objective for H2 of the current financial year was to work with us to further improve the cost efficiency of direct-to-consumer lead generation through Paid Search compared to H2 of the previous year. We were tasked with:
- Decrease the cost of each unprotected family lead by over 20% year on year
- Maintain lead volume
Our Approach
Research & Planning: The Life Insurance market is competitive, with multiple online messages and products targeted at consumers with financial needs. To improve efficiency we tested and optimised a number of campaign elements:
- Ad copy and imagery
- Campaign types – paid search, Performance Max, Discovery Ads
- Bidding strategy – target CPA and Maximise Conversion with a target CPA
- Product types – Adapting budget split by product type based on performance
Strategy & Implementation: To increase efficiency, we focused investment on protection products that produced the most cost-effective unprotected family leads via our Phrase, Exact and Broad Match PPC campaigns.
Once leads reached LifeSearch's call centre their team would help families choose the right product for them, thereby creating sales across their product portfolio cost efficiently.
Use of Data: We called upon data from four main sources to drive optimisations and improve efficiency.
- GA4 – we used GA4 events to provide data for our bidding strategies that optimised to key conversion goals
- equiEDGE – our proprietary data warehousing and analytics solution allowed us to perform multi-channel attribution analysis combining online and offline event data to arrive at a single source of performance truth
- Auction insights – This was particularly key to understanding our position in the PPC auction and where we could adjust our search impression share to drive volume while adhering to our cost per acquisition target
- First-party data – We cross-referenced our data against LifeSearch’s in-house CRM database to understand lead quality and conversion rate. By individually tracking each keyword, we cross-referenced our performance data against LifeSearch’s customer data.
Optimisation: Through an optimisation timeline we managed copy refreshes, reviewed bidding strategies, redistributed investment, and assessed lead quality to ascertain deeper performance insights and optimisation recommendations on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.
We also closely monitored auction insights and adjusted our search impression share position based on our need to drive lower-cost conversions. This was done on a weekly basis to make sure we were responsive to market changes and maximising our bids.
Innovation: We incorporated GA4 events into our campaigns, so we could deploy a smart bidding strategy, especially for Broad Match campaigns, to ensure we drove the required actions based on our KPI with as little budget wastage as possible.
Including a Broad Match campaign meant we could expand conversion potential in our largest campaign without cannibalising volume. We could identify new search terms to either include within our main campaign or negate if they were more informational or lower in conversion intent.
Results
By hyper-targeting our paid search campaigns and leaning on a number of data sources, we hit our target, improving the cost- efficiency of unprotected family lead generation. In Q3 we delivered 117% of the forecasted unprotected family volume for the quarter, at a cost per lead 17% lower than forecasted – all while investing 2% less than our planned investment!
- 117% of expected lead volume delivered
- At a cost 17% below forecast and
- 29% lower than the same period in the previous year
- Saved 2% of the client's budget
Danielle Moore, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at LifeSearch said:
“We’re really happy with the efforts of the team to focus our paid search activity on improving efficiency – they've been very responsive to our objectives, and we’ve achieved great results in the last quarter!.”
17% reduction in cost per improtected family lead
29% reduction in cost per lead Year on Year
2% of Client budget saved
Interested in seeing what we can do for you? Get in touch and let us know about your requirements today.
