We increasingly find ourselves speaking with finance advertisers about attribution modelling, and specifically about the consumer clickstream. What click journeys do users undertake before finally arriving at your site to get a quote or make a purchase? And vitally, how do you attribute value to each of these clicks in a fair and effective way, so that you can re-invest in keywords accordingly?

In an effort to better understand user behaviour around path-to-purchase, we recently undertook a study with Nielsen. There are some useful insights which we hope advertisers can use in conjunction with their own data to facilitate conversations around path-to-purchase and attribution.

Click here to access a preview of the study.

Highlights for Car Insurance:

• 6.5 million: people in the UK online Car Insurance market

• 60: % of car insurance purchasers who used Search during their journey

• 21: % of Car Insurance purchasers who used both Generic and Brand search terms

• 12.3: % of Car Insurance purchasers who used only Generic search terms

• 10: average consumer's number of days in market before first sales interaction

• 14.6: % consumer Look to Book rate for Direct Insurers in car Insurance market

Source: Nielsen

We've been talking about mobile search marketing for some time, and advertisers in the Finance sector are increasingly forming strategies and starting to make moves in this area.

If you look at growth trends for a term like 'car insurance', for queries made on mobile devices over recent months, it's clear that consumers are ready to engage on the mobile platform.


Source: Google internal

The challenge for advertisers is to ensure that your brand is ready to be found in the mobile space, and to facilitate interaction and loyalty with your target consumer. We've formed some high level best practices for mobile marketing:

Be Clear
What are your mobile business objectives? Conversions; Engagement; Downloads..?

Be Found
Build optimised campaigns for mobile, and use engaging ad formats such as Click-to-Call and Location Extensions with Maps

Be Ready
Create a website that follows mobile best practices

Be Smarter
Consistently track and report, and optimise accordingly

Read more in Ian Carrington's (Mobile Advertising Sales Director, Google EMEA) mobile strategy article in Marketing Week