When the right metric is in place, everything else has something to optimise toward.
Admiral Business sells insurance policies to SMEs across the UK. Their products differ substantially in value — a courier policy and an employer's liability policy might look identical in a conversion count but deliver very different revenue. That value data was already being imported into Google. Nobody was using it.
We came on board at the same time as a completely new marketing team. No attachment to how things had been done before, no defensiveness about inherited decisions. From the first conversation, the team wanted to understand the thinking behind every change — not just improve the metrics.
The goal at the time was CPA — which treats all policy sales as equally valuable, regardless of whether the policy is worth £100 or £1,000. Once you see the maths, CPA stops making sense immediately. The new team didn't just accept that — they got it straight away and pushed us to go further.
The target should be ROAS, not CPA. That was agreed before we touched anything in the account.
"The first thing we changed wasn't the campaigns. It was the goal. Once that was right, everything else had something to optimise toward."
Conversions were tracking. Some terms appeared to be performing. But the numbers underneath told a different story.
The new team understood that some changes would cause short-term dips before delivering long-term gains. When we explained that adding negative keywords would temporarily reduce reported ROAS before it improved, they trusted the reasoning and backed the decision without hesitation. That kind of trust is rarer than it sounds.
We started working with Admiral Business at the beginning of high season. Rather than compare to the months before — which would flatter any seasonal business — we measured what mattered: performance against the same period the previous year.
Admiral Business came in as a completely new marketing function — no legacy positions to defend, no reluctance to question what had come before. When we told them that pausing high-cancellation terms would reduce reported conversions before improving real ones, they didn't push back — they asked what else we should be looking at. That's not a common response. The pace and scale of what was achieved in six months is directly connected to that working relationship.
20 minutes. Enough to spot the major issues, understand what you need, and give you a realistic idea of what we'd do and what it would cost.
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