1 GOOGLE’S IMPORTANCE IN THE BUSINESS OF GENERTEL

The main theme of this article is developed on Google’s search engine and more in particular on the analysis of the impact it has on a company that aims to develop the majority of its business on the online channel. This article will focus particularly on the case of the company Genertel SpA, but it’s important to take into consideration that the majority of the themes and

the models developed in the following pages are completely applicable to each reality that activates a web channel and which wants to systematize some analysis methods or study some important aspects on the theme of search engines and their potential.

Genertel SpA is a company of direct insurance of Assicurazioni Generali SpA, and is that section of the group founded in 1994 in Trieste to enter the insurance telephonic market, and progressively, also in the online one, overcoming the traditional figure of the mediator between the company and the final customer.

Genertel has always pointed towards the telephonic path, identifying itself as the first company to create only one call center able to manage all the clients of the company which from always represents one of the principal core competences of the society. Despite this, with the passing years the web channel has gained always more importance, and from today represents a firm key point in the company: this, in fact, not only represents the window of the products of the company and the channel for making a quote and monitoring of the contracts by the customers, but even more developed is also the channel for full self-service through which the users can bypass the contact-center and complete autonomously all the phases of quoting, stipulation, management and renewal of their insurances.

When people talk about direct insurance companies they are referring, like stated before, to all of those companies which allow bypassing the level which interposes between the final customer and the insurance provider, represented by the traditional figure of the mediator, or insurance agent.

In the first years in history in this type of companies the telephonic channel was the one which represented the great key point and innovation, that is the cause for which they were often identified as "telephonic insurances"; up to the current days, despite the telephonic component is always present and maintains an absolutely important and necessary position, it’s exactly the web channel that has been strongly developed and innovated.

Today, the starting point in each direct company is precisely the websites, through which the users are able to bring to an end all possible activity: from the quotation to the signature on the contract, from the managing of the insurances to the possible complaints, from the view of the marketing campaigns to the evaluation of the insurance products offered. This is the reason for which, with the passing of the years, more than "telephonic insurances" the market is leading towards the definition of direct companies as "online insurances".

Treating the theme of the online market and the development of the “Internet Era”, it’s impossible not to face with the growing reality of search engines.

Since the beginning of 90s some scientists have bet on the creation of those evolved forms of directories, supported by an intelligent algorithm; they were able to give back to the users’ questions, defined queries, a series of results that were ranked according to a certain logic, importance or priority. It was the birth of the first search engines, then developed year by year so becoming always more powerful, smart and precise, and identified by a

continuous growth that have transformed them in a solid and fundamental reality within the Internet market. The search engine became the natural mean used by users for reaching the final websites during the browsing, both when they are searching for a specific brand and site and when the intention of navigation is more generic and not specific.

In a scenario of such importance and solidity, it was born in Mountain View (California) a company that today represents the undiscussed leader of the search engines market: Google. The market share it reaches at a global level stays around the 70%, even if in some countries this share rises also to a higher level. It is the case of Italy, where Google covers about the 95% of the total search engine market, and also the background where the business of Genertel takes place.

Now it’s the time to combine the two themes related to the extraordinary growth of the search engines and to the digitalization era of the insurance market, remembering also what can be defined as the monopoly of Google within the Italian online search market. It’s not difficult to image the results of such a situation that brings to the fast rising importance that the company of Mountain View (Google) can represent today in the business of the direct insurances, included Genertel.

In order to quantify the term "importance" on the impact between direct insurance companies and search engines, it is possible to use a tool offered by Google that allows to know the average number of researches in the search engine: Google AdWords.

Taking into account the 20 queries related to the direct insurance market with the highest monthly search volume, their sum results to be greater than 400k. These are really scary numbers, which if added to the search volumes of the infinity of other less frequently used queries, lead to monthly volumes that are close to a million searches, excluding those related to the brands of various insurance companies. Focusing on the contrary on the part related to the brand, also in this case the figures are impressive: taking as an example the case of Genertel, the only KW (keyword) "Genertel" has raised about 200k monthly average researches in the last year.

In the same direction of the just discussed theme, another important data must be found in the trend of visits that the company Genertel received from the users coming from sources linked to Google (Figure 1).

Thanks to the trend line reported here it’s not difficult to notice how the volumes of the visits in Genertel’s website deriving from Google have clearly grown in the past five years, with the total that has even tripled from 2009 to 2014, reaching peaks also superior to 500k monthly visits: these numbers are very interesting, in particular if one thinks that they only come from the Google search engine.

Focusing on the visits linked to Google, it’s necessary to do certain segmentations in order to have a complete and more detailed view of the internal phenomena of the same search engine. The users that access a site through a search engine must be divided in two distinct categories that are

for definition very different from each other and reflect different behaviors, as it will be seen in the continuation of the article.

Figure 1: Visits to the website “www.genertel.it” from Google sources.

Google’s Organic Visits: with "organic" one intends all that is not by payment; in this case, it is referred, therefore, to the clicks deriving from the search results not sponsored, so related to the queries of the users that Google classifies in a natural way according to its powerful search algorithm.

Google’s PPC Visits: this second item includes, instead, all those visits originated by the clicks relative to the sponsored results, the ones that get therefore defined as PPC (pay-per-click). SERP (search engine result page), which present a CPC (cost-per-click), whose share varies according to different factors, and in first place the competition for each specific keyword, creating like this an auction to determine the positioning inside the paid part.