R+V24 offers car insurance with low premiums. With competitive pricing and comprehensive products, the company focuses on customers who are price-sensitive and like comparing offers online to find the best fit. While streamlined processes enable R+V24 to gain cost advantages and offer economical products, the marketing team wanted to drive cost efficiency through smart search strategies.
About R+V Direktversicherung AG
Part of the R+V Group
Founded in 2008
www.rv24.de
Rundown Goals
Drive sales
Maintain acquisition costs
Rundown Approach
Implemented Smart Bidding strategy Target CPA
Moved to AdWords data-driven attribution
Rundown Results
Conversions tripled
Conversion rate increased by 118%
Cost per acquisition fell by 50%
Mobile conversion share grew to 70%
R+V24 sells insurance solely through online channels. Their primary focus used to be maintaining a low cost per order (CPO), which resulted in a strong brand focus in search campaigns. However, this focus served to reach customers who were already aware of the brand. To broaden the customer base and generate more sales from users without prior brand awareness or affinity, R+V24 wanted to increase the share of generic sales while still meeting their ambitious CPO goals.
In order to broaden the R+V24 customer base, the team adopted the AdWords Smart Bidding strategy Target CPA (tCPA) as a way of reaching relevant potential customers through generic search queries. The algorithm would determine which generic search queries and users were likely to convert after seeing one of the brand’s ads, and would bid higher than would have been allowed within their normal parameters and campaign setup.
Once tCPA performance stabilised, R+V24 also implemented data-driven attribution to feed more relevant data to the Smart Bidding algorithm. “Even campaigns that don’t lead to a direct conversion can get their fair share of a conversion, which in turn helps Smart Bidding to understand a campaign’s role and improve budget allocation”, explains Online Marketing Manager Daniel Roveda.
"What was particularly surprising was the improvement in conversion rates. We had multiple generic campaigns with outstanding conversion rates that performed even better than our brand campaign, which was unprecedented for us."
- Andreas Bode, CEO, R+V24
The new approaches more than paid off: conversions tripled, conversion rate increased by 118% and cost per acquisition fell by 50%. “We have met our overall CPO goals despite multiplying the share of more costly generic sales”, says company CEO Andreas Bode. “Hugely improved conversion rates were the driving force behind this change. Smart Bidding enabled us to reach the customers we needed to reach at a higher CPC cost, but managed to improve the bottom line as these customers were more likely to convert.”
Another result was that mobile conversion share grew to 70%. “Working closely with Google, we identified campaigns with outstanding mobile performance, determined which queries were particularly relevant for mobile users and adapted our tCPA through Device Bid Adjustments”, Daniel says. “The combination of more refined tCPA setups and device-tailored ads has significantly affected these campaigns and resulted in a clear uplift.”
What’s next on the agenda for R+V24 marketing team? “We will certainly put more resources into attribution modelling and use the results to improve our ad spend”, Daniel says. “And we’re putting more emphasis on mobile usability and performance. The first impression is key for user experience. As generic searchers are mostly mobile users, it’s of utmost importance to guarantee a positive experience.”
