Insurance carriers spend millions of dollars on digital advertising each year, but they actually have a lot in common with the publishers they’re buying ads from.
Just think…if you’re an insurance advertiser, you’re also the owner of a highly trafficked website that serves hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. And these aren’t just any visitors—they’re high-intent insurance shoppers, many of whom have filled out a quote request form that provides important information about where they live and what kind of household they’re in.
This makes your audience extremely valuable—not just to you, but to anyone who offers insurance products. And like any good publisher with a large, valuable audience, you’re leaving money on the table if you’re not finding ways to monetize every last visitor who arrives at your site.
For many of your visitors, the path to monetization is fairly obvious: You’re an insurance carrier, and you’re going to try to sell them an insurance policy. But what about the visitors you can’t sell a policy to, under any circumstances? You know, the ones who live in states where you don’t write policies, or whose customer profiles don’t match the kind of people you serve.
When it comes to these visitors, you have two choices as a publisher: Either you can let them leave without contributing to your bottom line, or you can monetize them by serving a high-value ad for another carrier who can actually offer them a policy.
While it may sound counterintuitive to direct your site visitors to another carrier, these ads are a great way to offset your marketing costs and generate new revenue that can be used to attract customers who can buy a policy from you. Remember, you wouldn’t be able to sell them a policy, anyway. And by pointing these shoppers toward a carrier who can help them, you improve the user experience and build goodwill with consumers who might be a better fit for you down the road.
Curious about how all this works? Keep reading.
How insurers can monetize their traffic—without costing themselves a single sale
When we talk to carriers about serving ads for the first time, they’re understandably skeptical about the idea of sending some of their site visitors to a competitor. But there’s no sense in letting this valuable potential revenue stream go to waste—especially when it doesn’t cost you anything.
Of course, you’ll always want to try to sell a policy to the visitors who are likely to buy from you. But once an insurance shopper fills out the forms required to request a quote on your site, it may become clear that you simply cannot generate a sale from them.
Most often, this happens in one of two scenarios:
- The would-be customer lives in an area where your company does not offer policies. If you don’t sell insurance in California, you have nothing to lose from pointing a Californian toward another carrier. Or you might offer insurance in Florida, but not in specified flood zones.
- You’re a standard carrier and the visitor is a non-standard driver, or vice versa. There’s no point moving forward with a customer if you know that their driving record doesn’t align with the sort of policies you sell.
In either of these instances, you’re not going to sell a policy—so you might as well sell an ad.
Once you have this additional revenue stream, it’s up to you to decide what to do with it. If you want, you can keep your incremental revenue as pure profit to offset your marketing costs. Or you can re-invest the money into your customer acquisition funnel to increase your scale.
Keep in mind, your ads aren’t just any old digital ads—they’re extremely valuable due to your data-rich, high-intent audience that is actively shopping for insurance. When carriers sell ads on their websites, the highest-value visitors can sometimes fetch a price of more than $100 per click.
Ready to get started? We’ll help you open a valuable new revenue stream in no time.
When you think like a publisher, you get a powerful opportunity to monetize site visitors who are not part of your prospective customer base. By serving ads to these users, you open up a highly effective, zero-risk revenue stream that can be used to offset your digital marketing costs and increase your profits.
And when you work with our experienced customer service team to get up and running, you’ll be able to start generating this new revenue right away.
In fact, you might find that selling ads with us is so valuable to your business that you’ll even want to start serving them to certain visitors who are eligible to buy your policies but unlikely to convert… but that’s a topic for another article.
Until then, we look forward to chatting soon about how thinking like a publisher can help you make the most of every site visitor.