Which channels produced bound policies?

Commercial insurance economics are dominated by retention. A policy bound this year is worth its commission again next year and the year after, so the true value of a channel is several times what a single-year view suggests.

Because matching is on the client rather than on a session, running the report over a multi-year range credits renewal commission back to the channel that produced the original inquiry. That comparison usually justifies far more acquisition spend than a first-year view does.

Comparison-shopping traffic converts poorly and binds at the lowest premiums. Producer-led and referral inquiries bind at much higher rates and larger premiums, and they arrive in smaller numbers.

Ranking by bound premium and commission separates them. It is common for the channel producing the most quote requests to be near the bottom on commission, which is not visible at all in a cost-per-quote report.

Commercial brokerages grow through producers, and a producer's pipeline is a network rather than a funnel: former colleagues, trade association contacts, a banker who refers, a contractor who tells another contractor. That business is real, expensive to maintain and entirely absent from any advertising report. Folded into an attribution figure it makes the paid channels look better than they are; left out altogether, the brokerage cannot see how much of its growth rests on a handful of individual relationships that will eventually retire.

Mapping a producer column as Product / service (one extra breakdown per import) answers half of that. The report shows commission by producer, with how much of each producer's book traces to a marketing channel and how much arrived with no marketing involvement at all. It does not split each channel by producer. That second figure is often the more useful one, because it is a concentration question as much as a marketing one: a book where three producers write most of the new business behaves very differently the year one of them leaves.

Where a producer keeps a list of the accounts they have been working, those accounts can go into the lead file, tagged with the producer's name as their source, and rank on bound commission like any other source. Where they do not, and many do not, the revenue stays in Direct / Unknown, which is the truthful answer rather than a gap to be filled in. Nothing is spread across the paid channels to improve the attributed share, so the figures that are attributed remain worth acting on when the budget is set.

Commission is a percentage of premium, and premium moves for reasons that have nothing to do with marketing. A hardening market lifts rates across a book; a softening one takes them back down again. Judge a channel on commission alone across two years of rate movement and you will conclude that your advertising improved dramatically in the hard market and collapsed in the soft one, when in fact the campaigns, the creative and the budget never changed at all. Nothing in the media plan explains either movement, and yet the media plan is what gets rewritten in response to it.

The protection is to read policy count and commission together, and to compare like periods. The report shows both, so a channel producing the same number of bound accounts at a higher average commission is visibly a rate effect rather than a marketing one. Comparing a quarter against the same quarter a year earlier rather than against the quarter immediately before it removes most of the remaining confusion, and it costs nothing but choosing the range deliberately. Reading the two together takes a few seconds and prevents a conclusion that would otherwise last a year.

The same care applies to mix. A year in which one producer wrote two large construction accounts will show a channel's average commission jumping without anything having improved about the channel. A line-of-business column mapped as Product / service, and the sale count sitting beside the revenue, make that obvious rather than mysterious. It is the difference between a report that informs a budget decision and one that generates an argument nobody in the room has the data to settle, and it is worth mapping at the first import so every later period reads the same way.

A contractor chasing a general liability certificate to satisfy a job requirement and a manufacturer reviewing a complex program are both inquiries. One binds within a week for a few hundred dollars of commission. The other takes four months, a submission to several markets and a broker's sustained attention, and is worth many multiples of it. A cost-per-inquiry report puts the two in the same row and ranks the channel that produced more of the first one higher. The ranking that results is a ranking of how easily each channel generated paperwork.

Splitting by line of business, and by premium band where you have it, separates what the blended number hides. The channel producing the most inquiries can turn out to produce almost none of the commission, while a quiet source generating a handful of submissions a month carries the year. That is not an argument for switching the first one off, since certificate work leads to renewals and referrals, but it is an argument for funding the two differently.

The column costs nothing to add. Agency management systems already carry the line of business on the policy record, so it comes out of the same export as the bind date and the commission figure. Mapped as Product / service, it gives the report a line-by-line breakdown of commission with the attributed share of each, which is the cut a brokerage tends to ask for second, immediately after seeing the headline total. It does not rank channels inside each line, but it maps onto how the brokerage is organized, which is why it survives into next year's plan.