Once such insurer doing this successfully is Legal and General. Here we’ll take a look at the Legal and General customer journey from a user’s point-of-view, when searching for a product through to eventual purchase.

Search

Legal and General doesn’t appear on the first Google SERP so it has invested in PPC to increase its visibility and compete with the comparison sites.

Here are the results for ‘home insurance’.

The other factor that Legal and General takes care with here is in ensuring its advert is attractive enough to take attention away from any other ads in the paid search listings.

The format of the ad is large and detailed, without appearing too cluttered. It has made good use of Schema mark-up to add a user rating which helps differentiate it from competitors.

It also uses the strong proposition “55% of new customer pay less than £145 a year”, which although isn’t as attractive as More Than’s stark £99 offer, it offers more consumer trust thanks to the other details supporting it.

For the search term ‘life insurance’, Legal and General has not only successfully placed a paid ad right at the top of the page, but also appears third in the organic listing. 

For other products that Legal and General offer – car insurance, pet insurance, mortgages, ISAs –  the company doesn’t appear in either organic or paid listings. 

It’s excellent that Legal and General appear so highly in both organic and paid listings for ‘life insurance’, as it’s a surefire way to encourage click-through, however being as the other products aren’t doing so well in search, perhaps it could refocus its PPC strategy on these.

Landing page

Paid search placement depends as much on relevant landing pages as much as it does on ad spend (this is known as ‘quality score’ more information can be found by clicking the link). 

Legal and General has created bespoke landing pages for both of the PPC ads it has running. Each one tailored for the advert’s specific message. 

Here’s the ad for ‘home insurance’ with the message “55% of new customer pay less than £145 a year”.

And here it is repeated in the landing page.

This is relevance is vital to succeed in PPC.

As you can see, the bespoke landing page is very different from the counterpart product page if accessed from within the Legal and General site.

The variation isn’t just in the colour choices and general layout, it’s in the content itself. 

On the landing page which I clicked-through from search, the features of the three types of cover are clearly compared side by side and the sole focus of the design is to persuade a visitor to ‘get a quote’ as quickly as possible. There are only two calls-to-action (CTAs) and they both say the same thing.

One the product page found on the site, there are many more options in terms of messaging, navigation and contact. The whole feel is more relaxed, less urgent.

Clearly Legal and General understands that the searcher may have more urgent needs and likely to bounce away quicker if they can’t access the information they want as easily as possible.

Obtaining a quote

Once you’ve clicked ‘get a quote’ you are through to a six-step process of form-filling. Just to caveat first of all, forms for online retailers need to be as succinct and easy to use as possible, with the minimum amount of information required to encourage conversion.

For financial services where the products offered require a lengthier commitment and the possible exchange of more in-depth personal information, more detailed forms are required.

Let’s take a look at a breakdown of the ‘about you’ page where I’ve highlighted areas where Legal and General have made the process as easy as it can be.

Looking at the page from top-to-bottom:

  1. Telling your users exactly how many steps there are is very important for transparency.
  2. You can trust your users to be careful when they type their own email address, they don’t need to confirm it a second time.
  3. Tell your users immediately when they’ve made a mistake, don’t leave it till the end of the form.
  4. Use a pop-out calendar so users can be totally sure they’re entering the right day and date.
  5. A find address button saves on an entire address’s worth of unnecessary form-filling and removes the chance of making a mistake.
  6. One large CTA will encourage a user to click-through to the next form.
  7. As this can be a long process, it’s necessary to provide a ‘save quote’ function so a user can return at a later date. This has the added bonus of capturing their data even when the form hasn’t been completed.
  8. It’s essential to reassure users that their privacy is secure. 

Further reading:

For more on the blog concerning the customer journey, check out these posts…