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Insurance purchases are highly personal and have many considerations — how much coverage do you want, are you adding family members to your plan, are you bundling multiple kinds of insurance? As with most complex, expensive, or personal purchases, insurance consumers turn to the call channel.
Because it’s a highly considered purchase, most insurance shoppers call a provider’s call center or their local agent to get their specific questions answered and tailor a plan unique to their needs. And they often make those calls after engaging with an insurer’s paid search ad.
Paid search is a highly effective channel for driving insurance phone leads. According to the Local Search Association, 78% of insurance consumers say they called a provider after running a search.
To boost your paid search ROI, it’s important that you drive more quality phone leads to your agents and locations. Below, we provide 7 quick tips to help you do just that.
The first — and easiest! — step is to ensure you’re using call extensions in your paid search ads. Because the majority of insurance consumers engage with a provider by calling after running a search, you want to make it as simple as possible for them to call you. Call extensions display a phone number or call button alongside your ad — one that the searcher can click to place a call directly from the search engine results page.
Call extensions come at no additional cost. When a consumer places a call from a call extension, you’re charged the same as if they clicked through to your landing page.
A best practice is to schedule call extensions only when you have agents available to answer the phones, like between the standard business hours of 9am to 5pm if you’re driving calls to local agents. This will help ensure you’re not wasting spend driving unanswered calls.
Bid adjustments are a handy tool that allows you to automatically alter your bids based on where, when, and how people search. As a result, you can prioritize your ads for certain searchers.
In order to drive more calls, you can add bid adjustments to prioritize mobile devices. You can also use bid adjustments to prioritize versions of your ads that have call extensions.
You can use a call tracking and analytics solution to uncover deeper insights about the device types, keywords, ad groups, locations, times of day, and more driving the highest-quality phone leads and make bid adjustments to optimize for those as well (more on this later.)
If the goal of your ad is to drive calls, spell that out for searchers. Your copy and call to action (CTA) should encourage them to pick up the phone.
Don’t just rely on an overused CTA like “Call Now” to cut through the noise. You should get creative and experiment with several variations while monitoring your metrics to determine what drives the best results.
CTAs like ”Talk to an agent now” or “Call for 24/7 agent assistance” can set you apart by assuring prospects a live agent is waiting to speak to them at the other end of the line.
Not all searchers will call you directly from your call extensions. Some may require additional information or persuasion before they’re ready to engage with you over the phone. This is where your landing page and website comes in.
To drive calls from your landing page and site, place your phone number in an easy-to-access location. The conventional placement for a phone number is in the header, so it remains visible as you scroll down the page.
However, you shouldn’t rely on convention when deciding where to place your phone numbers — you should rely on your metrics. Experiment with multiple phone number placements and see which receive the most clicks. Since searchers using smartphones are far more likely to call than fill out a form, you may want to place greater emphasis on the call button for the mobile experience.
You can also use heat maps to help you drive calls from your landing pages. By identifying your web visitors’ scroll and click patterns, you’ll be able to ensure everything is firing correctly — your copy placement, form placement, and call button placement.
If you’re serving location-specific landing pages, you can encourage calls by adding a photo of the local agent to put a face to the person visitors will be connecting with.
It’s important not just to drive calls from your paid search ads, but to track the calls you’re driving so you can make data-driven optimizations. Marketers are doing this by using dynamic number insertion to place tracking phone numbers in their call extensions and on their landing pages.
You might ask, why should I use trackable phone numbers from a call tracking provider instead of sticking with Google’s call reporting features? Call tracking not only works for all the phone numbers on your site (Google can only work for one) and all the sources beyond Google Ads that drive calls (Bing, SEO, social, display, email, etc.), it gives you deeper insights into each call by analyzing phone conversations with AI (more on this in the next section.)
With call tracking, you can see the full volume of calls your paid search ads are driving. But how can you tell if the calls you’re driving are qualified leads? Google’s reporting allows you to see that a particular keyword has driven a call (in some cases), but your insights end there.
As we touched on earlier, some call tracking solutions are equipped with AI. How does it work? When calls are placed from your trackable phone numbers, the solution records, and transcribes the conversation and uses AI to analyze and scores them at scale. As a result, you can understand exactly how many sales calls versus service calls each of your keywords is driving. You can also see how many calls converted to sales opportunities, new policies, appointments with an agent, and more.
These insights allow you to make smarter bidding optimizations to drive more high-quality phone leads. With Google’s data, you can only action on the volume of calls your keywords are driving. By contrast, when you use a conversation intelligence solution, you can cut spend on keywords that are driving a high percentage of service calls and increase spend on keywords that are driving a high percentage of sales opportunities.
Driving more phone leads to your agents and locations is an ongoing process that requires constant testing and optimization. To achieve optimal results, you should experiment with various combinations of bid adjustments, CTAs, copy variations, landing page layouts, and budget allocations. Throughout the process, you should evaluate not just the quantity of the calls you’re driving — but also the quality and outcomes — and use that data to fine-tune your campaigns.
To learn more about how call tracking data can enhance your insurance marketing strategy, download our Call Tracking Study Guide for Marketers.
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