SEM Case Study: How Ad Monitoring Helps Insurance Advertisers
Sep 7, 2014 Finance & Insurance 
The Search Monitor's client is a leading media and communications agency. The agency's client is a large insurance company with both offices and locally focused SEM campaigns throughout the US. In general, ad monitoring in the insurance vertical faces many challenges not present in other verticals:
Our agency client had two main SEM challenges: ONE: They needed to understand their competition at a geographic level. Since they operated offices and managed campaigns in dozens of metro areas, they needed to know top players and imminent threats down to the city level. TWO: They needed to understand how their competitors' ads appeared and performed on mobile devices. Their analytic data showed them that a larger percentage of consumers were requesting insurance quotes from mobile phones.
The agency created customized data pulls that generated biweekly reports with their competitive insights and client recommendations. The data were broken down by keyword and by geographic locations and included ad copy, average ad rank, market share, CPC, monthly budget, and biggest threats. To analyze mobile activity, the agency created separate reports from Google's mobile network to focus on ad copy, mobile-specific offers, and the destination URLs of their competitors. They wanted to know how many mobile ads took users to mobile-friendly landing pages. With all of these reports, they were scheduled to run each week and then be automatically emailed to the account team plus a few contacts on the client side. They also created alerts based on different SEM criteria that were emailed independently of the regular reports.
"We gained visibility into competition in Bing in certain high priority geo locations. The data helped our team draft ad copy based on what our leading competitors were offering. When it comes to mobile, we had no idea what we didn't know before using the Search Monitor. Mobile as a channel is more and more important now and it’s great that Search Monitor can track Google mobile and show us best practices of our competitors."
Client & Vertical Background
The Search Monitor's client is a leading media and communications agency. The agency's client is a large insurance company with both offices and locally focused SEM campaigns throughout the US. In general, ad monitoring in the insurance vertical faces many challenges not present in other verticals:- Higher CPCs and monthly ad budgets. Top-tier advertisers can pay more than $50 for CPCs, for example
- A smaller concentration of top-tier names versus verticals such as food or retail with greater competition
- Strict FTC regulations about what they can promise and what they must reveal in their ad copy
Ad Monitoring Challenge
Our agency client had two main SEM challenges: ONE: They needed to understand their competition at a geographic level. Since they operated offices and managed campaigns in dozens of metro areas, they needed to know top players and imminent threats down to the city level. TWO: They needed to understand how their competitors' ads appeared and performed on mobile devices. Their analytic data showed them that a larger percentage of consumers were requesting insurance quotes from mobile phones.Search Monitor Data Used
The agency created customized data pulls that generated biweekly reports with their competitive insights and client recommendations. The data were broken down by keyword and by geographic locations and included ad copy, average ad rank, market share, CPC, monthly budget, and biggest threats. To analyze mobile activity, the agency created separate reports from Google's mobile network to focus on ad copy, mobile-specific offers, and the destination URLs of their competitors. They wanted to know how many mobile ads took users to mobile-friendly landing pages. With all of these reports, they were scheduled to run each week and then be automatically emailed to the account team plus a few contacts on the client side. They also created alerts based on different SEM criteria that were emailed independently of the regular reports.Ad Monitoring Results
"We gained visibility into competition in Bing in certain high priority geo locations. The data helped our team draft ad copy based on what our leading competitors were offering. When it comes to mobile, we had no idea what we didn't know before using the Search Monitor. Mobile as a channel is more and more important now and it’s great that Search Monitor can track Google mobile and show us best practices of our competitors."