Having serious trouble with adwords

Forum,
I am asking for some help with understanding adwords. A friend and I have put together an insurance quote site and wanted to use adwords to drive traffic to our site.

After trying adwords, I have a ranking of poor on 99% of every word I use. When I try new words or campaigns, it defaults to a minimum of $5 to $10 per click. To me this is outrageous. I have a site that is clearly an insurance quote site, adwords that google suggested itself, and ad text that reflects those found in other ads.

I have read here that you want to have keywords that are really focused and small in number per campaign. I have done that today. Erasing all other campaigns, I still get the poor rating and google requires a $5 cpc to activate.

How long will it take to recover from a poor rating? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Russell
PS- would be glad to offer more detail if necessary.

Insurance is very competitive. You might try to focus on different keywords, perhaps ones that are more targeted. For example, if you're trying keywords like "auto insurance" then you might try "new york auto insurance" or phrases with your location in them.

People will first search for "auto insurance" (the general phrase) but later on when they're looking to actually buy it they tend to use phrases with their locations in them.

Hello Russell. Welcome to the club. As Bill mentions, insurance is a tough sell. Beyond trying locations (an excellent idea that can work) consider focusing on less common types of insurance.

Every agency has auto and home insurance. Those keyword phrases have enormous numbers of searches, high competition and high bids.

Think about more unique types of coverage you can offer or create pages and target specific types of insurance or specific types of business.

I see one major issue in many insurance related advertising accounts (and others as well). That is the tendency of advertisers to mix keywords that don't match the ads.

Even if you think of E&O as the same as liability your potential clients probably don't so do not mix keywords for one with the other or show ads that say liability insurance for keywords for errors and omissions insurance.

Ideally ALL of the keywords in an ad group should match the TITLE used in the ad. (Sometimes you must put the words in the text instead if they won't fit in the title.)

It's a bit of a catch-22 situation.

You want the keyword to be in the title of the advert, but you also want your advert to stand out (which it won't, if everyone else has the keyword in their title).

I've had some limited success putting the keyword in with other words in the title - e.g. Great Rates For {KeyWord:Insurance}...

Also you might be getting charged $5+ because your landing page may be being classed as poor, have a look at your landing page and be sure that the keywords are in the content and title, this will help bring the price down...hopefully, insurance isn't a genre I cover so it might naturally be that expensive!

btw - Welcome to the forums custardmite

Edit - whoops, this is old

Not THAT old. New posts are good. Insurance is somewhat challenging but I have been able to get good results for independent insurance agents.