About American Collectors Insurance

American Collectors Insurance (ACI) is an industry-leading insurance agency that deals in the unique category of insuring classic or collectible cars and vehicles. They are trusted by thousands of insured customers nationwide and always put their customers’ passion for cars first.

They collect leads through their website and take calls from their customers, market their insurance offerings on referral sites, and spread the word about their business through PPC and social media outreach. Since the insurance quoting process happens predominantly offline, ACI struggled to track and identify where things were working in their sales process and where they weren’t.

What Challenges Were They Facing?

ACI’s analytics system was reporting inaccurate and, for the most part, useless data to their teams. While they did have conversion tracking established on their site to an extent, their previous agency set it up incorrectly. Rather than tracking actual form submissions and where those leads were sourced from, their site was only keeping track of when certain buttons throughout various pages were being clicked. As a result, their marketing team regularly reported better results than what was actually being generated from the site, costing their company significant money.

As is the case with any sales process or customer journey, there was a noticeable drop in engagement or conversions across various steps of the funnel. Their lack of precise analytics and mostly offline sales process made it virtually impossible to determine where in the funnel they were experiencing drop-off (and no way to track beyond the lead itself). So, they needed new systems implemented right away to correct course. 

ACI was hoping to fix their tracking mechanisms, build out their system to track relevant marketing data — from marketing campaign to sale — to create more accurate PPC campaigns, and increase overall website performance.

Sound like challenges your business is facing right now? Don’t hesitate to contact me today to see if I can help with your CRO and analytics needs.

How I Solved the Problems

Before diving into the more significant issues with ACI’s site, I first cleaned up their tracking to fix their poor conversion tracking. Overreporting from their marketing teams prevented them from making adjustments to optimize PPC campaigns, so I made sure to track the correct lead collection events moving forward. 

I set up an offline system using the web submission form itself so that when a lead submits their information, the form would send the GAID into their CRM. By storing Google Analytics IDs in their Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we could automatically push actual sales data (such as the revenue) back into Google Analytics when customers finally converted at the end of the offline funnel.  This allowed them to not only report and optimize on the lead but the actual sale itself. This is incredibly useful for a B2B business. By connecting the CRM & the Marketing Analytics together, it creates full funnel journey analytics. 

A similar solution is being implemented for their call tracking, which is a point in their funnel where most online engagement goes offline. This will allow ACI’s team to track sales back to the original marketing or search source that resulted in a phone call being made. Then, the phone number is looked up by the system to get a call tracking number, which is paired with Google Analytics to match client IDs. 

Results Achieved

With proper tracking and dashboards in place, ACI is equipped with all the tools necessary to attribute sales to their associated marketing sources. With more data and insights, ACI’s paid advertising campaigns have become far more effective without requiring increased budgets because they’re appropriately targeting the correct type of audience that typically converts on their site.

Their teams better understand how their analytics and marketing systems work and communicate with one another, so reporting is precise, and inaccuracies are kept to a minimum. They can routinely make adjustments to their marketing campaigns and strategies based on actual data and, most importantly, can save large quantities of cash while doing so.

Hear from ACI 

“Among other areas of extreme competence, Josh’s business acumen, blend of human/data intelligence, efficient problem solving, highest level of professionalism and ability to successfully communicate complex digital marketing findings within all levels of an organization makes him a top analytical mind in the Agency world.”

Chris Gilbert – Digital Projects Manager – NSM Insurance (American Collectors Insurance)

COMPANY CREDIT (Where I worked on this client): Great Big Digital Agency. FTF.