Bilmer Sigorta is an insurance agency serving customers across Turkey, primarily in complementary and private health insurance. Its business model is consultative, built on finding the right policy over the phone. What was missing was not expertise; it was a foundation on the digital side to meet demand.
Today the same brand has a site that loads in 0.6 seconds, an application funnel dedicated to complementary health insurance, and qualified policy requests arriving at a 22 TL cost per lead.
The Starting Point: An Unmanageable Site and an Ad Channel Without a Funnel
Bilmer Sigorta's site ran on an old Umbraco installation. Updating content required technical support, pages loaded slowly and the infrastructure maintenance burden kept growing.
More importantly, there was no suitable destination for advertising. Visitors arriving from ads landed on a corporate page that described every product at once. In a category like insurance, where the product changes completely from one line of business to the next, that is the easiest way to burn through a budget.
The Diagnosis: The Problem Was Not the Ads, It Was the Foundation
Digital demand in insurance depends on three things: the visitor seeing the page without waiting, focusing on a single product, and their application not getting lost. All three were missing at Bilmer Sigorta.
- The infrastructure was slow and unmanageable. Every content change required technical intervention.
- There was no page suited to advertising. Traffic landed on a generic page that did not help anyone decide.
- The application flow was undefined. No one measured where incoming requests landed or how quickly they were answered.
Solution 1: We Rebuilt the Site From Scratch on a Static Architecture
Instead of patching the existing installation, we built the site over again. All 57 pages were reproduced on a static architecture that does no server-side work: pages are served as ready-made files, the maintenance burden disappears and load time drops to the 0.6 second level.
A new language was established on the brand side as well: the corporate color palette, custom heading typography and the brand's mascot took their place across the pages. The product hierarchy was reorganized to put complementary health insurance first in every list.
Solution 2: We Migrated SEO Without Losses
The most common mistake in website rebuild projects is letting the URL structure quietly change along with the new site. Addresses that search engines have known for years disappear, rankings drop and no one can work out why.
On this project we preserved the old URL structure exactly; for the addresses that had to change, we wrote permanent redirects into both the server configuration and the .htaccess file. When the new site went live, there was no break from the search engines' point of view.
Solution 3: A Separate Application Funnel for Complementary Health Insurance
Instead of sending ad traffic to the corporate page, we built a separate application page designed solely for complementary health insurance. The page asks a single question: apply for a suitable policy. Menu clutter, cross-product messaging and distracting links were deliberately left out.
Meta campaigns were connected directly to this page. As a result, the promise of the ad and the content of the page matched exactly — this was the single most decisive move in raising the conversion rate.
The Result: 22 TL Cost per Lead, 12X ROAS
In the complementary health insurance campaigns run on this new foundation, cost per lead settled at the 22 TL level. More importantly, the incoming requests are reachable by phone and genuinely looking for a policy; they are requests the agency's sales team can actually work with.
Return on ad spend was measured at 12X on the agency's commission revenue — that is, every 1 TL spent on advertising came back to the agency as 12 TL of commission revenue. We point out deliberately that this ratio is calculated on commission rather than on policy premium: in insurance, the agency's revenue is not the whole premium but the commission it earns on it; ROAS figures calculated on premium look higher than they really are.
| Before Smartkid | With Smartkid | |
|---|---|---|
| Site infrastructure | Unmanageable Umbraco installation | 57-page static architecture |
| Load time | Pages generated server-side | 0.6 seconds |
| Ad destination | Generic corporate page | Application funnel dedicated to complementary health insurance |
| URL structure | — | Preserved exactly + permanent redirects |
| Cost per lead | Not measured | 22 TL |
| Return on ad spend (ROAS) | — | 12X (based on commission revenue) |
The work continues: campaign optimization, monitoring of the application flow and expansion of the content side are all ongoing.
The Lesson From This Case
In insurance, ad budget is usually burned not by targeting but by the destination. When a visitor lands on a page that loads slowly or leaves it unclear which product it belongs to, loss is inevitable no matter how well the campaign is built.
What we did at Bilmer Sigorta comes down to this: we built the foundation first — a fast site, a preserved URL structure, an application funnel focused on a single product — and only then turned the ads on. Reverse that order and cost goes up while quality goes down.
On this project we worked like a team assigned to the brand: designer, developer, performance marketing specialist and customer success manager at the same table.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should an insurance agency website move to a static architecture?
Because an agency site's job is not to manage content, it is to collect demand. Heavy content management systems do server-side work on every page request, which means slowness, update friction and a security burden. On a static architecture, pages are served as ready-made files: load time drops below a second, infrastructure maintenance is almost eliminated and the visitor arriving from an ad sees the page without waiting.
How are existing search rankings protected while a site is rebuilt?
By preserving the old URL structure exactly and setting up a permanent redirect (301) for every address that has to change. On the Bilmer Sigorta project, old URL parity was kept across all 57 pages; the redirects were written into both the server configuration and .htaccess. In rebuild projects, the most common cause of traffic loss is not the design but an unannounced change to the URL structure.
Is a 22 TL cost per lead good in insurance?
It depends on context, but in a line as competitive as complementary health insurance it is a low cost. What really matters is the quality of the lead: a request that can be reached by phone, is genuinely looking for a policy and is routed to the right line of business. A cheap lead you cannot reach costs more than an expensive one; that is why we optimize campaigns on quality as well as cost.
Which channel is more effective for complementary health insurance?
Meta is strong at reaching people who fit the profile but are not yet researching the product; Google captures the user who is actively looking for a quote. On the Bilmer Sigorta engagement, we built the entry to the funnel on Meta and sent traffic to an application page dedicated solely to complementary health insurance rather than to a generic page; that separation was the real factor behind the lift in conversion.
How should ROAS be calculated in insurance: on premium or on commission?
On the agency side, the correct measure is commission. The policy premium is the amount the customer pays the insurance company; the agency's revenue is the commission it earns on that premium. Calculating ROAS on premium makes it look like a return on revenue that neither the marketing agency nor the insurance agency actually earned, and it makes the figure look far higher than it is. The 12X ratio we report on the Bilmer Sigorta engagement is calculated on commission revenue.
Why should an insurance request coming from an ad go to a separate page?
A corporate homepage describes every product and forces the visitor to make a choice; a user arriving from an ad came for one product only. An application page focused on a single product, with no unnecessary menus or options, removes the hesitation. This is often the fastest way to get more applications out of the same ad budget.