Specialist Strata Insurer

A specialist residential strata insurance underwriter operating across Australia came to Involve Digital with a challenge most agencies would sidestep: prove that paid search could drive incremental growth for a product with a 2-to-6-week committee-led sales cycle.

Strata insurance is not a consumer purchase. Individual unit owners do not make the decision. A strata committee or AGM does. That lag between quote and policy bind distorts every short-term metric. Add state-by-state legal terminology differences (QLD uses "body corporate" while NSW, VIC and SA use "strata") and you have a category where generic campaign approaches are almost guaranteed to underperform.

The CFO set a clear benchmark: deliver a 1.5× Year 1 ROI before any larger commitment would be approved. This was a proof-of-concept, not a brand exercise.

We structured the account to respect the realities of the market rather than fight them.

Three Search campaigns were built from the outset. Match types were kept strict, Phrase and Exact only, to avoid low-quality traffic from renters and unrelated searches. A Display campaign ran alongside for brand support, using custom intent audiences (competitor terms) and remarketing for quote abandoners. Each campaign had its own keyword strategy, geographic targeting and bid structure, built around the commercial reality that this is a low-volume, high-value product where every wasted click costs disproportionately.

One of the most consequential decisions came early. We ran a landing page A/B test: 50% of traffic to the home page and 50% to the direct quote engine. The results were decisive. The quote engine as a landing destination cost over A$980 per quote. The home page, which delivered the educational context that committee-led buyers need before committing, came in under A$80 per quote. We killed the quote engine test and sent all traffic to the home page.

Targeting was deliberately conservative at launch. We used strict Cresta Zone postcodes to avoid CBD high-rise towers that would inflate cost per click without converting, and built comprehensive negative keyword lists before a single ad went live. This was not about volume. It was about proving the model worked at a unit-economics level the CFO would sign off on.

At the 8-week mark, we had 111 quotes but only 30 bound policies, a 27% strike rate against a projected 40%. On paper, it looked like underperformance. In reality, it was pipeline.

Those quotes were sitting with strata committees. The CFO asked the right question, and the answer was that the sales cycle was working exactly as expected for a committee-led product. Rather than front-loading spend and hitting the KPI review with incomplete data, we made a tactical call to slow campaign pacing. This gave the pipeline time to mature alongside the spend.

We also cut what was not working, fast. Display generated just 4 quotes and zero policies. Even the remarketing layer showed no measurable contribution. We paused both entirely inside 8 weeks and redirected all focus to search, where the economics were working.

Attribution was handled honestly. Google Ads showed 213 quotes; analytics showed 39. The gap was not error, it was how each platform counts. For a considered purchase where users click a paid ad, leave, and return via organic or direct, paid search was driving first-touch discovery. We made sure the client understood the true impact sat between the two numbers, and every cost reported included our agency management fee. No media-only figures designed to look better on paper.

At the close of Phase 1, 145 quotes were still sitting in committee pipelines. If those convert at the projected 40% rate, the final Year 1 ROI would reach approximately 2.0×.

This insurer did not just prove paid search could work for a committee-led product most agencies would have written off. They built a model that compounds: every policy renews, every renewal adds to the base, and the economics only improve with time. Phase 2 is now a 12-month commitment.