Strengthen your Attribution Modeling knowledge to gain a more holistic understanding of your customer.
This is the sixth post in our Insurance Marketing series, sharing tools to help insurance providers identify their most profitable audience segments, increase their marketing ROI, and drive conversion and revenue growth.
Why is Attribution Modeling important?
Employing Attribution Modeling helps insurance marketers better understand which marketing channels are converting and their associated ROI. This is particularly important across device types to improve your unified view of the customer. Tools such as Google Analytics default to last-interaction for their attribution reporting, but assisted attribution can also be setup for a more complete view of the path to conversion.
While using a last-click attribution is useful, it may not tell the whole story for some insurance carriers because the customer’s journey to that last action may have taken several weeks or months and cut across multiple channels and devices.
Updates in Google Analytics provide even more insights to close the gap on cross-platform user journeys with a focus on user acquisition, retention, segmentation and lifetime value.
As an example, a consumer might be searching for life insurance and finds your website by clicking on one of your pay-per-click ads. One week later, she returns to your website, but this time by clicking from a social network. Later that day, she returns for a third time via clicking through one of your email campaigns; and hours later, she returns to submit a request for quote via an online form on your website.
Applying last-click attribution, the Direct channel would receive 100% of the credit for the sales revenue (assuming the RFQ converted to a sale). Applying a linear attribution model, each touch point in the conversion path receives equal credit. Applying Google’s position-based attribution (first/last click receive most credit), Paid Search and Direct would receive the majority of the credit with Social and Email receiving less credit.
The key is to map your direct and indirect sales channels and think about aligning your choice of Attribution Model accordingly. For instance, consumers who buy direct from your website might rely on multiple digital touch points (ads, social media conversations, web chat sessions) to make a final purchase decision.
As a result, applying a blended Attribution Model (linear, position-based, etc.) may make more sense. In contrast, if a commercial customer tends to not view ads or consume top-of-funnel content and instead relies more heavily on sales rep conversations before they buy, then you might consider a last-click approach.
Another important thing to note is to not frequently change Attribution Models as it will be key to get your Marketing, Sales and executive leadership teams aligned on a common methodology so that performance tracking and reporting can be understood by all stakeholders.
Up next, we’ll review how Creative Dynamics can help insurance marketers automate personalization.
Ready to take your ads, and your business, to the next level? Get in touch with the DELVE team today.