PIC Insurance Brokers, New Zealand’s Largest Independent Insurance Broker, faced a challenge familiar to many established brands - an underperforming and unmeasurable advertising strategy.
PIC partnered with Calibrate to shift their marketing focus from traditional to digital, developing a best-in-class Google Ads strategy that would drive consistent and profitable customer acquisition. This would directly impact the bottom-line and give management confidence to scale up investment.
Objectives:
- Deliver strong ROI to justify shifting budget away from traditional media.
- Significantly increase new customers and revenue.
- Achieve a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) below break-even targets across key product categories.
+650
%
Return on Investment
+569
%
Growth in Leads
+$600
k
in new customer revenue within the first 6 months
Navigating the Shift to Digital
Without historic digital campaigns or baseline to work from, we had a unique opportunity to build out a best-in-class Google Ads strategy, getting it right from the start in a highly competitive category.
Our approach was to create a competitive advantage by combining Google Ads best practices with a robust first-party data and measurement framework, engineered to drive revenue from day one.
Combining Google Ads and First-Party Data
To build PIC’s competitive advantage, we first architected the data infrastructure to feed offline sales data back to the advertising platforms.
By integrating PIC’s CRM and call tracking data, we could pass offline conversion events - including each lead status update and the final deal value - directly back into Google Ads.
This robust measurement was the enabler for true value-based optimisation and allowed us to identify customers introduced to the business to ensure management understood the value of the campaign.
With the data pipeline in place, we activaed Google's AI best practices across our search campaigns, powering it with PIC's first-party data to optimise for new customer revenue, not just lead volume.
Controlled tests were run using Google Ads Experiments which demonstrated the superiority of this approach - our strategy lifted conversion value by 18.6% while delivering 12.2% growth in ROAS.
Optimising Conversions with Bespoke Landing Pages
To maximise campaign performance, Calibrate designed and developed bespoke landing pages for each insurance product. We conducted A/B testing across the page design, messaging, and form layouts to drive continual improvement, resulting in conversion rates over 20% - well above industry benchmarks.
These high performing pages played a key role in driving efficient, profitable growth by reducing the cost per lead. Without these landing pages, we estimate the cost per lead would have been 50% higher.
Technology Stack
Results and Measurable Impact
From the very beginning, results from the campaign exceeded all expectations:
Delivered a 650% ROI, proving the power of digital advertising as a primary acquisition channel and justifying the full transition of marketing investment away from traditional advertising.
Leads grew 569% over the same period with the influx of new business being so strong that it forced PIC to rework their sales process and hire new staff to handle the increased demand.
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) well below break-even targets across all insurance products – resulting in a highly profitable advertising strategy.
+650
%
Return on Investment
+569
%
Growth in Leads
+$600
k
in new customer revenue within the first 6 months
2025 Finalist
Google Agency Excellence Awards
With the outstanding performance driven by this marketing strategy, Calibrate was named a 2025 Measurement Solutions Award Finalist at the Google Agency Excellence Awards (one of only two independent agencies across both Australia and New Zealand to be honoured).
“Calibrate has been a fantastic partner for PIC. They guided our move into digital advertising and executed the strategy flawlessly; delivering results that exceeded expectations.”
Taylor Mosen
Head of Partnerships, Marketing & Communications at PIC Insurance Brokers
