What are the main challenges facing insurance marketers? 

Long sales cycles and delayed attribution: Insurance purchases involve long decision-making periods as customers compare policies and wait for renewal dates. This delay complicates policy sale attribution, often favouring performance media and over-crediting the last touchpoint instead of considering the full customer journey. 

Limited cross-channel visibility: Customers engage with multiple touchpoints across online and offline channels, including walled gardens such as Google, Meta and Amazon which restrict data-sharing. This fragmentation makes it difficult to track the entire customer journey, leading to challenges in accurately measuring attribution and ROI. 

Balancing brand and performance marketing: Awareness and trust-building efforts via upper-funnel channels like TV and OOH have long-term effects that do not immediately translate into measurable sales. These brand-building activities are often undervalued due to a lack of precise measurement, making it harder to justify long-term investment. In contrast, performance marketing, such as PPC and paid social, deliver short-term, trackable results but cannot substitute for weak brand presence. This leads to higher customer acquisition costs. Achieving the right balance between brand and performance marketing is critical for an effective marketing strategy and sustainable growth.  

Impact of pricing and seasonality on media effectiveness: Insurance purchases are highly price-driven, particularly during peak renewal periods, making it difficult to isolate media-driven impacts from competitive pricing and seasonal demand fluctuations. 

Challenges with aggregator sites and attribution: A significant proportion of insurance policies are purchased via price comparison sites like CompareTheMarket and GoCompare. This complicates media attribution by raising questions about whether policies bought via aggregators should be credited to marketing efforts or pricing alone. Insurers must balance direct response marketing with maintaining a strong presence on these platforms.  

By analysing historical data, MMM can estimate the extent to which aggregator-driven policy volumes is influenced by marketing efforts versus organic traffic. It quantifies the relationship between brand and performance media in driving policies, considering both aggregator sites and direct. As a result, MMM provides a holistic view of media effectiveness across all conversion paths, allowing insurance brands to optimise their marketing investments with confidence. 

What are the benefits of incorporating MMM into marketing strategies? 

By utilising MMMs into their marketing strategy, insurance brands can navigate the complexities of attribution with greater precision, ensuring that both brand-building and performance-driven efforts contribute effectively to overall policy sales and growth. The ability to quantify long-term brand impact, optimise media allocation and adjust for external factors like pricing and seasonality allows insurers to make data-driven decisions that maximize efficiency and ROI. 

Geo-incrementality testing further enhances MMM accuracy by providing real-world validation of media effectiveness, helping to refine model estimates and improve confidence in attribution results. 

Ultimately, MMM provides a holistic, scalable and future-proof approach to media measurement. It helps insurers reduce acquisition costs, refine their aggregator strategy and strengthen their competitive positioning; whilst finding an optimal mix between brand and performance marketing. In an industry where customer journeys are long and fragmented, MMM serves as a critical tool in balancing short-term conversions with sustainable brand revenue growth, driving higher policy sales and long-term marketing effectiveness.