Stanhope Insurance is a specialist insurance provider. It supplies a range of insurance offerings, including policies that cover non-standard properties to high-value homes, watch and jewellery collections, as well as life and private medical insurance.

The Challenge

The insurance industry is competitive, with price comparison websites and household-name brokers dominating the SERPs. Due to the number of alternative providers competing for visibility, the cost of acquiring leads can soar. Google’s E-A-T guidelines pose a further challenge to those operating within this sector. 

Stanhope Insurance’s long-term goal is to become the go-to industry leader for specialist item and home insurance and to help it get there, Impression was tasked to drive high-quality leads, sustainably and profitably.

Specifically, across a 6-month period, our objectives were to: 

• Drive an agreed amount of leads to specified service pages per month
• Reduce CPA below a set target
• Increase “get a quote” leads rates driven by core service pages by 10%

The Strategy

We restructured existing paid search campaigns, creating segmented ad groups and expanding on a range of high-intent keywords. A pool of ad copy supported this, ensuring ads targeted search terms within the tightly themed ad groups

A more granular approach to account management enabled us to identify and monitor which ad groups drove the highest-quality leads. Learning from the data, we refined the account structure over time, leveraging high-performing themed ad groups to bid smarter and reduce CPA

Alongside this, an SEO audit conducted by our team highlighted the opportunity to optimise paid traffic landing pages to better showcase expertise, authority and trust and to enhance the user experience 

Due to the complexity of insurance, there is a lot of important information to convey to the user and in this case, key product pages contain a particularly large amount of text. Whilst informative and necessary, we know from CRO best practices that when pages are text-heavy, it can be overwhelming for a user, making the content both difficult to digest and navigate 

Our conversion-rate-optimisation (CRO) team scoped out this idea further, selecting a few key service pages to use as the basis for running tests via VWO 

We began the development of the test by making the following changes to the pages:

• Adding another Reviews.io widget into the hero banner of the page, allowing us to better showcase the 5* rating for Stanhope Insurance
• Adding an additional call to action further up the service page to encourage warm users to complete their journey to “get a quote”
• We added a block containing links to the different sections of the page (jump links) to allow users to be able to easily navigate between the different content sections
• Finally, we moved the “Get a Quote” form further down the page, positioning it underneath the main service content. We also updated the background colour to make it more prominent and contrast against the other content on the page
•  

This initial test ran for 29 days from March 24th until April 21st 2022 and achieved 97% statistical significance. This meant that it was 97% certain that the optimised pages will perform better vs the previous ones.

The Results

Across 6-months, our integrated approach allowed us to deliver sustainable results above and beyond for our client. Following this period, we received the go-ahead to implement our recommendations across all service pages. As a result, Stanhope has hired more staff and branched out into new product areas, such as life insurance. 

• 30.4% above the monthly lead target per month from core service pages (83.41% increase YoY)
• 8% decrease in CPA
• 16.80% increase in “get a quote” lead rate from core service pages (+15.60% increase achieved by end of initial test: Mar – Apr)