Alliance Insurance Brokers (Sold in 2021) approached me with the simple aim to rejuvenate their stagnating leads and sales pipeline. For every £0.54 they were spending on advertising they were earning £1 back. They wanted me to reduce this CPA to squeeze out more leads whilst maintaining their current advertising spend of around £100,000 per month.

Alliance’s paid strategy was dominating the long-tail keyword market, so I wanted to pay more attention towards increasing their general SEO strengths. I therefore conducted a link building strategy designed to drastically increase their prominence. This link building strategy lead to over 800 genuine backlinks.

Alliance was a B2B insurance broker, so they only dealt with businesses, this meant almost every single one of Alliance’s clients (over 30,000) had a website that they were using to promote their business. My idea was if we could get a link from their website’s back to Alliance’s we could benefit from the link equity that those domains would pass us. So here was my plan:

1. Develop a ‘Certified Insured’ badge that inserts itself via Javascript onto Alliance’s client’s websites.
2. Email the entire customer database with the code and the steps on how to paste this Javascript code onto their website(we detailed steps for WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix and Plain HTML)
3. All badges would have a link to a Certificate page which would dynamically update the name of the company in the text, depending on which button the user clicks on, for which client – this was developed using Dynamic Text Insertion using URL Parameters.

This meant we only had to develop one certificate page that would have been able to cover all clients and simply have a dynamically update URL attached to the page that pulls URL parameter data from the Company Name used on the insurance policy.

The email campaign resulted in over 800 genuine backlinks and an automatic infrastructure that presented these badges with links back to Alliance’s website in the user portal for each new client that signed up. In other words, 800 almost instant backlinks with the chance of more trickling in with every new customer that signs up.

When I encountered Alliance their advertising accounts were operating at an ROAS of just under 100%. In other words, for every £1 they spent they’d make just under £2 back as revenue. This is pretty great, especially for the insurance industry, but they knew they could take this further with the expertise. So, they hired me, and then we got to work.

Google’s algorithm is good for leaning budget into areas of higher conversions, but when a conversion = a lead and not a sale it made sense to change what we’re optimising around. The campaign had been grown based on Manual CPC, this is because it made it easier to control budgets which is pivotal in the Insurance Industry. For example, a single click for ‘Public Liability Insurnace’ can cost £360. Yes that’s right, three hundred and sixty pounds. It’s not really a great deal to sell an insurance product that yields Alliance £150 in broker fees (if that). So in order to control ROAS I needed to control CPC.

I did this by combining the advertising data with the Salesforce CRM data and blending the two on Google Data Studio (Now known as Google Looker Studio). This blend of data allowed me to identify which keywords were leading to which sales and then exporting that data into a spreadsheet.

Once the blended sales and marketing was compiled I ran this through a calculator that I had built on Google Sheets, this highlighted areas where budget was being leaked. We actually identified areas of higher conversion with little sales in that we subsequently diverted budget away from.

Once all of the calculations had been ran over three months, along with a whole new overhaul to the negative keyword list and Ad Groups the results were staggering.

Within three months Alliance were earning thousands upon thousands of pounds per month more than before they hired me and this was almost completely correlated to the changes made on the paid advertising side. Which consisted of over 80% of the business they were bringing in.