Marketers know how important it is that their paid advertising reaches their target audience with the right message, at the right time and place.
This concept is even more important when it comes to advertising in the insurance vertical when life events such as getting married, having a child, or making a big purchase (such as a new car or home), often trigger conversions (such as customers applying for new insurance policies).
In fact, a recent study from Deloitte found that having children, changes to your overall financial situation, and becoming a homeowner are the top three life events that prompt customers to apply for new life insurance policies.
Therefore, advertisers navigating in the insurance industry need to not only run paid media campaigns that reach consumers when they are experiencing these life events, but with messaging relevant to the type of life event customers are experiencing.
To do this, insurance vertical advertisers need to use cross-platform, integrated tools that combine analytics insights with media and campaign performance data. These integrated tools help advertisers in the insurance vertical know when and how customers experience these life events (from first, second, or third-party data). This helps inform not only their overall paid media strategy but, more importantly, the customer journey and how marketers in the insurance vertical can optimize each touchpoint on that journey to drive users further down the conversion funnel.
To optimize those touchpoints, advertisers in life insurance marketing need to know the true value of campaign performance across their media mix, and also be able to pinpoint which touchpoints drive the most conversions (i.e. policy applications). The best way to uncover the true value of your media efforts and discover a full picture of the overall life insurance marketing success is by using multi-touch attribution.
Using a multi-touch attribution model helps advertisers in the life insurance vertical understand which touchpoints and channels drive the greatest number of new policy applications. Most importantly, multi-touch attribution helps uncover the true CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) of individual media channels.
The true CPA, uncovered via multi-touch attribution, is often lower than originally perceived. As a result, you can adjust your media budget and allocate more funds to channels that you otherwise avoided putting budget towards due to a perceived high CPA with low perceived ROAS.
How does a Multi-Touch Attribution Model help advertisers in the life insurance vertical understand the true value of their media mix?
Multi-Touch Attribution is a way to measure how impactful each touchpoint on the customer journey is in driving conversions (like new policy applications). To do this, brands need the right technology platform to facilitate multi-touch attribution (such as Google Analytics 360).
Once the right analytics platform that enables multi-touch attribution is implemented, advertisers can take things a step further by creating custom attribution models that assign varying weights of conversion credit to each channel or touchpoint on the customer’s path to conversion. This allows marketers to uncover the true value of paid media across all different channels and partners.
In the case of insurance marketing, using a multi-touch attribution model can also help advertisers evaluate the relationship between conversions, customer life events, and their customer journey.
As a result, media campaigns can be optimized to reach users at the right time (such as experiencing a life event) at the right place (i.e. impression on a publisher site or search query relevant to the life event) with the right message (e.g. ad copy and/or creative that speaks to the specific pain point of the user while experiencing the life event).
Understanding the true value of paid media is also important because it helps marketers to pinpoint their most successful channels and properly allocate media budget to them as opposed to wasting media budget on channels that don’t drive conversions. Properly allocating budget helps drive better ROI and ROAS from media campaigns and associated channels.
In addition, multi-touch attribution can help advertisers in the life insurance marketing space discover how paid media in different stages of the customer journey interact to drive users down the funnel to conversion.
For example, a multi-touch attribution model allows advertisers in the life insurance vertical to see how the top of funnel display impressions leads users to a paid search conversion later in the funnel. Being able to visualize this relationship allows marketers for insurance brands to ensure the touchpoints that aid in micro conversions also receive the proper amount of credit for also contributing to macro conversions.
Why should Life Insurance advertisers use a Multi-Touch Attribution Model in Life Insurance Marketing media campaigns?
Multi-touch attribution improves the overall CPA of media campaigns by uncovering the true value of each touchpoint along the customer journey to conversion.
Therefore, advertisers in the life insurance vertical can look for any areas where they might be duplicating conversions or look for areas of overlap across their media channels to cut waste. From there they can reallocate budget to channels with the lowest CPAs to drive new policy applications in a more cost-efficient way.
Using multi-touch attribution to uncover the true values of different channels and media campaigns also highlights the true CPA of individual channels, which is oftentimes lower than the false CPA that rudimentary life insurance marketing strategies might calculate from single-touch attribution models.
Marketers in the life insurance vertical can now better allocate budget and prove increased ROAS from media campaigns and channels, as strategy pivots are backed by the data-driven insights from multi-touch attribution.
What’s the next step in using Multi-Touch Attribution for Life Insurance Marketing?
Once your brand has successfully implemented a multi-touch attribution model, you can take things a step further by using data-driven machine learning and applying it to your multi-touch attribution model.
For example, at DELVE we help marketers in the life insurance vertical discover the best multi-touch attribution model for their unique digital marketing goals. Then, we apply Google’s data-driven machine learning algorithms to accelerate the process of analyzing campaign performance, without compromising on data-accuracy.
These machine learning algorithms assign a weight to various touch points based on past performance with the aim of maximizing campaign conversions. As a result, brands can quickly and efficiently make adjustments to their budget and media campaign approaches based on the intelligence of their own data.
Bottom Line
Multi-touch attribution allows marketers in the insurance vertical to understand the true value of their full media mix, including how well each channel and/or media campaign drives users down the funnel to conversion.
When marketers better understand the true value of their media mix, they can optimize investment across channels and campaigns to lower CPAs and maximize ROAS. This contributes to an overall more cost-efficient life insurance marketing plan.
Finally, multi-touch attribution helps advertisers in the life insurance vertical understand how their media campaigns interact with each other, and as a result, they can properly attribute credit to touchpoints that drive both micro and macro-conversions
To learn more about optimizing life insurance marketing, get in touch with the DELVE team today to download our case study and learn how we partnered with the Gerber Life Insurance Company (GLIC) to drive new policy applications at a lower CPA with multi-touch attribution in Google Analytics 360.