Clearly the health insurance industry is a big, big industry that rakes in trillions of dollars.
The health insurance industry, however, has to acquire and retain customers on the Web, just like everyone else - just at a more competitive pace. AdGooroo recently looked at the health insurance category and paid search advertising. It examined U.S. Google AdWords activity for desktop and tablet on 6,003 health insurance-related keywords in the first half of the year, from January to June 2014.
AdGooroo found that the health insurance industry is highly competitive in paid search advertising (of course), but more specifically that nearly 28,000 advertisers spent $103 million sponsoring 6,003 health insurance-related keywords on desktop and tablet during the first half of 2014, at an average Cost Per Click of $3.16 and an average Clickthrough Rate of 3.86 percent.
Perhaps more interesting, is that the competition was particularly high for the top 20 keywords (health insurance, medicare, blue cross blue shield, obamacare, united healthcare, affordable care act, medicare.gov, humana, medicare part d and aetna - to name the top 10). The top 20 keywords averaged 171 advertisers per keyword. The top keyword, particularly, "healthcare insurance' had 358 advertisers bidding on it during the period.
Of course general terms had the highest number of competitors but even branded terms (like "blue cross blue shield") had dozens or, in blue cross blue shields' case hundreds (142) advertisers looking to get some of their traffic.