Situation
This leading medical benefits company offers a private Medicare supplement plan. Their website serves as a lead generation tool for this plan, allowing visitors to locate and call an 800 number to walk through the application process, set up face-to-face appointments, and obtain more information about the plan.
When the company partnered with iProspect, they had a CPA (cost per “application”) of $350 and asked iProspect to maximize the return of their pay per click advertising campaign while staying within that specified CPA. The company was also trying to generate a minimum of 350 new applications for their Medicare supplement plan by the end of their first year’s engagement with iProspect.
Challenges
The client faced a challenge created by their decision not to offer an online conversion mechanism on their website (e.g. filling out a form, downloading an application, etc.) – thereby making it impossible to track resulting applications or appointments back to their online marketing efforts. Though they did display various 800 numbers on specific landing pages, they could only link resulting inbound phone call conversions back to groups of keywords (rather than specific keywords) that mapped to various URLs. Because of this, they had no way of learning which individual keywords were producing results and which keywords should be enhanced or abandoned. Without this knowledge, optimization and improvement in their campaign’s performance was impossible.
In addition, the client’s Medicare supplement plan was only offered to customers in specific U.S. states and found it difficult to exclusively target those states without generating unqualified traffic from other states where the plan was not offered.
Solutions
At the outset, the iProspect team helped the client expand their targeted keyword list based on a thorough assessment of the content of their website and of the nature of the Medicare supplement plan. iProspect then recommended the creation of various landing pages that would be dedicated to specific keywords, and developed compelling ad creative to coincide with the landing pages.
iProspect also recommended the client set up an online application process, and subsequently implement a system of tracking those applications to the search engines and keywords that produced them. The resulting conversion data is now used to guide iProspect’s recommendations, particularly regarding keyword phrases utilized in the site content.
The iProspect team then initiated a blend of geographic and national ad targeting in an effort to more effectively target audiences in the specific states in which the client does business so that the campaign would drive more qualified traffic and filter out unqualified leads.
Results
The client's PPC campaign is currently their largest driver of Medicare supplement plan applications.
The client was named their industry's #2 seller of Medicare plans.
In six months, the average number of applications generated through their PPC campaign climbed from 68 to 4,199 per week.
A year and a half after campaign start, cost per application decreased by 98% — from $350 to just $8.
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