One account since 2022, more phone calls every year since 2023.
A Lower Mainland insurance brokerage we rebuilt in 2022 and still run. Client withheld by NDA. Every number below comes from the live Google Ads account, January 2022 to October 2026.
A respected brokerage with almost no digital pipeline.
An established brokerage with a strong referral base and a loyal walk-in flow. They were not in trouble. They were in stasis. Every year looked like the one before.
Their previous Google Ads account had been managed by a generalist agency on a percent-of-spend model. Broad-match keywords, near-zero negative-keyword work, no conversion tracking beyond “click on phone number”. The account was spending real money, and nobody could say which clicks turned into customers.
What we inherited at kickoff:
The state of the account
A thin campaign structure built on broad-match keywords, many of them irrelevant (“insurance jobs vancouver”, “icbc claim form”, “life insurance for dogs”). No negative keyword list. No conversion tracking inside Google Ads itself, just a phone number swap that fed everything into one bucket.
The owner's diagnosis was correct: “We're paying for a lot of clicks that aren't even our customers.”
We're paying for a lot of clicks that aren't even our customers.
The first month was almost entirely demolition. We turned off every broad-match keyword, replaced them with phrase and exact match variants, built a first negative-keyword list from search-term reports, and rebuilt conversion tracking from scratch: calls, forms, and call-duration thresholds (a 12-second call is rarely an opportunity).
Then we waited. Soft-launched the new build with a capped daily budget. The first thirty days were quiet on purpose. We were learning what the account actually looked like when the broad-match noise was gone.
Phase by phase, what the year looked like.
The account didn't do anything dramatic in any single quarter. It just got slightly sharper every ninety days, quarter after quarter.
The aggregate since 2022.
Jan 2022 to Oct 2026
Site forms only
2026, down from $82 in 2023
Jan 2022 to Oct 2026
Pulled from the Google Ads Avg. CPC column · calendar years · 2026 through October 9
Next to the industry average for insurance search ads.
WordStream by LocaliQ publishes Google Ads benchmarks by industry every year. Here is this account in 2026 next to the Finance and Insurance averages.
| Metric | This account, 2026 | Finance & Insurance average |
|---|---|---|
| Average cost per click | $1.38 | $3.39 2026 report |
| Cost per conversion | $14.63 | $74.44 cost per lead, 2026 report |
| Conversion rate | about 9.4% estimated | 2.55% 2025 report |
| Cost per phone call | $34 | Not reported |
Read this as a rough guide, not a scoreboard. The benchmarks come from US search campaigns, and this account runs in the Lower Mainland, where currency and auction prices differ. Every account also counts conversions its own way. We estimated the conversion rate from spend divided by average cost per click.
One number moved the wrong way: cost per conversion rose from $12.18 in 2024 to $16.03 in 2025, then came back to $14.63 in 2026. Cost per phone call, the number the owner watches, has fallen every year since 2023.
Sources: WordStream by LocaliQ, Google Ads Benchmarks 2026 and Google Ads Benchmarks 2025.
Tell us your category and what a good year looks like.
We'll come back inside one business day with whether the approach above applies to your account, and what to expect quarter by quarter.
What we'd do again, in any account.
Three moves that aren't glamorous and aren't in most agency decks. They built this account.
Negative-keyword discipline as a weekly habit
Every week, the team pulls the search-term report and adds new negative keywords. New junk searches show up every month, so the job never ends. The work is boring. The savings compound.
Brand defense before brand attack
Branded campaigns went live early in the rebuild, not as an afterthought. Competitors can bid on your name, and your own branded clicks are the cheapest ones you will ever buy. Pay for them before someone else pays more to send that searcher to a comparison site.
Cost per call as the North Star
No vanity metrics: no impressions, click-through-rate, or ad position. The owner sees one number: cost per phone call, week over week, on one dashboard. The simpler the dashboard, the less an agency can hide. If it rises two weeks running, we explain why before being asked.
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