From Just Under 100% To 300% ROAS For A Dorset Insurance Broker

Alliance Insurance Brokers came to me to rejuvenate a stagnating leads and sales pipeline. They wanted more leads out of the same budget, holding advertising spend at around £100,000 per month.

The link building strategy

Alliance’s paid strategy was already dominating the long-tail keyword market, so I turned to their organic strength instead. Alliance were a B2B broker, so almost every one of their 30,000-plus clients had a website of their own. If a link came back from each of those, Alliance would benefit from the link equity every one of those domains passed.

The plan had three parts:

1. Build a “Certified Insured” badge that inserts itself onto a client’s website via JavaScript.
2. Email the entire customer database with the code and instructions, covering WordPress, Squarespace, Wix and plain HTML.
3. Point every badge at a single certificate page that changes the company name in its text depending on which client clicked, using dynamic text insertion from URL parameters.

One certificate page covered every client, because the company name was pulled from the insurance policy through a URL parameter.

The campaign produced over 800 genuine backlinks inside a month, plus the infrastructure to keep going: the badge now appears in the user portal for every new client who signs up, at roughly 20 new backlinks a week.

Turning an asset a business already owns into links nobody else can copy is how I approach a link building campaign.

Our marketing team had struggled for months until we brought you on board.

Tom Green, CEO

The paid advertising overhaul

Across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and Meta.

When I took over, the accounts were running at a ROAS of just under 100%. That is respectable for insurance, but they knew there was more in it.

Google’s algorithm is good at moving budget towards conversions. The problem is that a conversion here was a lead, not a sale. The campaign had been built on Manual CPC because budget control matters enormously in this industry: a single click on “Public Liability Insurance” can cost £360, and the broker fee on the policy it might sell is around £150. To control ROAS I had to control CPC.

So I blended the advertising data with their Salesforce CRM data in Google Data Studio, now Looker Studio. That blend showed which keywords led to actual sales rather than just leads. I exported it and ran it through a calculator I built in Google Sheets, which surfaced where budget was leaking: areas producing plenty of conversions and very few sales. Budget moved away from those.

Three months of those calculations, alongside a full rebuild of the negative keyword list and the ad groups, moved ROAS from just under 100% to 300%. The sales rate rose 250%, because budget was going to the keywords that led to sales rather than the ones that merely led to conversions.

I also built a tool for quick manual bid adjustments off the back of sales data, and integrated UTM tracking with the CRM so we could see which parts of the account were generating sales rather than conversions.

Optimising toward sales rather than conversions is the core of what I do as a freelance PPC consultant.

The outcome

Within three months Alliance were earning thousands of pounds a month more than before they hired me, almost entirely from the paid advertising side, which accounted for over 80% of the business they brought in.

We’ve been banging our heads against the wall for months trying to work out why we weren’t getting the value we knew was available to us from our advertising spend. Our marketing team had struggled for months until we brought you on board, trialling different strategies, reading up on new tricks online, all of which never went anywhere. You came along with out of the box ideas that seemed to be very unique and personal to us, and it really works.

Tom Green, CEO, Alliance Insurance