For insurance advertisers looking to improve their customer acquisition performance, granular, transparent reporting is a must-have. That is, you need to be able to get an in-depth look at your performance, broken out by the many variables that might be influencing it. Otherwise, you’ll just be feeling around in the dark when it’s time to adjust your media-buying strategy for better results.
At MediaAlpha, we offer a set of versatile, in-depth reporting features that enable users of all levels of sophistication to better understand their performance and optimize their bidding accordingly. Among insurance customer acquisition platforms, we’re a leader in providing source transparency for our clients, enabling you to see how each publisher partner’s traffic is performing, broken out by the channel the traffic was acquired from (e.g. social media, paid search, etc.). Meanwhile, our team of hands-on industry experts is always available to help you make sense of your results or optimize your bidding for you, depending on your needs.
These reporting features can make a big difference in your performance, so it’s important to make sure you’re getting the most out of them. Here are four tips to do just that.
1. Connect your click data to your sales data
The MediaAlpha platform provides in-depth detail into every ad click that occurs on our platform—from the device the consumer was using, to the channel the publisher acquired them from, to the extensive list of details they submitted to the publisher. But unless you connect that data to your sales data, you won’t be able to see which shoppers purchased policies and which ones did not.
If you’re using our platform for your reporting, you can implement a conversion tracking token to connect the sales data in your customer relationship management (CRM) platform to the click data in the MediaAlpha platform. Essentially, a token is a string of encrypted letters and numbers that gets tacked onto the URL that consumers are directed to when they click one of your ads. From there, you’ll be able to connect the consumer’s click data to their behavior on your site, as well as any purchases they might make offline.
2. Use publisher and channel reports to understand and optimize source-level pricing
As we mentioned earlier, we’ve long been a leader in helping carriers break down their performance not just by publisher, but also by the various channels through which each publisher acquires its traffic. This source-level reporting is crucial for understanding and optimizing your performance, as carriers often see a great deal of variance in performance between different channels—even across clicks purchased from the same publisher.
You can see your performance broken out by publisher and channel by selecting Publisher and Channel in the “Group By” field of the advertiser reports page of the platform. This information enables you to optimize your customer acquisition strategy by adjusting your bids for consumers sourced from different channels.
For instance, if you notice that a publisher’s visitors are especially likely to convert for you when they come through a specific channel, you can use the Distribution page of the platform to apply a bid modifier that enables you to bid higher and acquire more of those consumers.
3. Pull click detailed structured reports to optimize performance at the click level
If source-level reporting is the first step to really understanding your performance, a click detailed structured report allows you to go one step further by giving you an even more granular view of how consumers are engaging with your ads.
While other reports enable you to analyze and optimize performance at the aggregate level, the click detailed structured report gives you a wealth of information about every single ad click. This information includes contextual details surrounding the click (e.g. device type, referring channel, operating system and time of day), as well as the information the consumer submitted when they filled out the quote request form on the publisher’s site (e.g. name, location, driving record, occupation, and more).
You can find these reports by selecting the Click Detailed Structured option from the View drop-down menu in the top left-hand corner of the advertiser reports page. Here’s what it looks like:
This granularity enables you to discover key trends that would otherwise go undetected if you were only analyzing aggregate performance by channel. For instance, an analysis of your click-level data might reveal that shoppers who come through paid search and own a home convert 50% more often than the average consumer.
Once you have these insights, you can use the MediaAlpha platform to adjust your targeting or modify your bids for consumers with different attributes based on your findings. As an example, you might decide to apply a 150% bid modifier for the aforementioned shoppers who own a home and arrive at one of your publishers via search.
4. Decide whether to track your performance on the MediaAlpha platform or manage your reporting elsewhere
We offer our clients the flexibility to track their results in the way that works best for them.
Many carriers track their reporting via the intuitive user interface on our platform. This option makes it easy to see your performance from a variety of angles, with the added bonus that it enables our team of in-house experts to do the same. As a result, our team members can use their expertise and publisher relationships to help you optimize your bidding strategy for maximum performance.
If you have more in-house resources devoted to optimizing your digital marketing performance, you might consider using an API to pull your results from the MediaAlpha platform into your own systems. The benefit of this setup is that you can more closely integrate your marketing reporting with other systems across your company—for instance, your underwriting. Of course, even when you handle your reporting yourself, our team is more than happy to answer any questions you might have.
Want more help understanding and optimizing your performance? Reach out to your account manager today.
MediaAlpha’s transparent, granular reporting features empower our advertisers to gain in-depth insight into all aspects of their performance. By taking advantage of these tools, you’ll be able to optimize your customer acquisition strategy in the way that best helps you achieve your marketing goals.
If you have any questions about how you can get more out of these tools, please don’t hesitate to schedule a meeting with your account manager. And if you’re not yet a MediaAlpha customer, we’d love to tell you more about what we can do to take your customer acquisition to the next level. Visit our website to set up a time for us to meet.