Cutting cost per policy 38% by paying for calls instead of clicks
A 40-agent auto insurance agency in the Mountain West was buying paid search directly and losing money on unqualified form fills. Moving to per-call buying with duration and geo gates changed the unit economics inside one quarter.
Results
What was actually broken
The agency was paying for clicks and form fills across five states, with no way to tell which keywords produced callers who could actually be written. Roughly half of all inbound leads were out of licensed territory or already insured, and the in-house team had no capacity to build attribution tooling.
Client: A regional auto insurance agency
What changed, specifically
Listed in the order the changes were made. The sequence mattered as much as the changes.
What it moved
Cost per written policy fell 38% over two quarters while total policy volume rose. The billable-call rate settled at 74%, and the agency retired its separate lead-buying budget entirely.
“We stopped arguing about lead quality the month we switched. Either the call met the rules and we paid, or it did not and we did not. That clarity was worth more than the savings.”
Run the same decomposition on your account
We will take a month of your call data and show you where it fails, before anyone talks about switching anything.