Policy Purchases Soar for American Hunting Lease Association

In 2021, the American Hunting Lease Association (AHLA) signed on with Black Propeller in order to have a dedicated team to manage and grow their multifaceted PPC platforms. As an industry-leading insurance provider for hunting lease insurance and vacant land/landowner insurance, AHLA has maintained a strong grip on their space in the competitive insurance industry year after year.

Now, over 2 years later, AHLA has become a longstanding partner that our team has been able to drive meaningful growth and value to all aspects of their business time after time again.

AHLA relies heavily on year-over-year performance data to show yearly growth, with a particular focus on policy purchases across different policy types, policy revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and return on ad spend (ROAS). They aim for a CAC between $40-$50 during peak seasons, along with a ROAS of at least 4x.

In 2023, we encountered significant challenges that threatened our profitability across core metrics that we have not encountered with their account in years prior. We saw widespread effects of CPC inflation on Google Ads that impacted our non-brand keyword CPCs with a 43% year-over-year increase and AHLA’s branded keyword CPCs skyrocketing by 213% in the same time period.

These impacts posed a threat to AHLA’s CAC and overall profitability. Additionally, a history of inconsistent policy purchase volume, revenue, and conversion tracking on Microsoft Ads led us to deprioritize ad spend this platform in favor of maximizing opportunities on Google and maintain consistency.

As a longstanding partner with a deep history and understanding of AHLA’s marketing landscape, we relied on our tried-and-true paid search campaign strategy on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. We created separate campaigns for AHLA’s core insurance products, with one campaign focused on “hunting lease insurance” keywords and another on “vacant land insurance” themes.

With AHLA’s specific 2023 goal to grow demand and revenue for vacant land insurance products, we allocated a higher budget to campaigns focused on this product exclusively to maximize reach and opportunities for relevant keywords in this segment.

We also embraced Performance Max on Google Ads to extend our reach and revenue through additional Google Ad networks and formats utilizing AHLA’s first-party data, image and video assets. We further maximized brand recall deeper in the funnel through a YouTube campaign for video remarketing, targeting users who engaged on the site but did not complete a policy purchase.

By sticking to our guns through our well-established Paid Search strategy while adding in new methods and tactics along the way, we were able to drive phenomenal year over year growth for AHLA across multiple areas of their business:

Year-over-Year Profit Boost:

• $595,838.81 in total Paid Search revenue, a 136% increase compared to 2022
• Google Ads ROAS reached 5.91x
• Microsoft Ads delivered an impressive 17.46x ROAS
• Combined ROAS for Paid Search stood at 6.59x, well above the 4x ROAS goal

New Year, More Policies:

• Achieved a 151% increase in policy purchases from Paid Search for core insurance products
• Increased vacant land policy purchases exclusively by 74%, which generated an additional $70,000 in revenue for this product, a 140% year over year increase

Reaching New Heights With Performance Max:

• Our Performance Max campaign accounted for 25% of total revenue from Google Ads campaigns, while boasting a 8.99x ROAS, the highest among all paid search campaigns

Our diligent efforts and commitment to our longstanding partnership with AHLA made 2023 their biggest year yet for Paid Search, and we are honored to have played a critical role in helping them grow their revenues year-after-year. This is a testament to how we strive for achieving long-term success for our clients by leveraging our tried-and-true strategies with our proactive approach to implementing new and noteworthy tactics to help our clients weather the tests of time in an ever changing digital landscape.