The Insurance Agent’s Guide to Understanding Google Analytics

Trying to improve your online marketing without measuring your results can leave you guessing rather than moving toward more leads and insurance sales. But there’s a relatively easy way to start tracking your website traffic – by understanding Google Analytics. This data gives you access to a ton of useful information, including details like where your visitors are coming from so that you know what’s working and what’s not.

While it may sound complex, understanding Google Analytics can be achieved quickly by insurance agents who want to know more about their website performance. In doing so, you can get a better idea of how to improve your marketing, such as by blogging more about topics that tend to get strong traffic.

In this Google Analytics guide for insurance agents, we’ll walk through the ins and outs of the platform so you can start to understand your audience better and ultimately convert more leads.

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What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free platform (at least for the base version) that website and app owners can use to measure traffic and related insights. After signing up for Google Analytics, you can simply add a tracking code to your website to start getting a sense of how many website visitors you’re getting, where they’re coming from, what pages they’re going to, and more. 

While that might all sound a bit complicated, understanding Google Analytics tends to be pretty easy. If you get stuck, plenty of free guides exist online, including likely those specific to where you created your website, such as WordPress.

What Are the Key Components of Google Analytics?

Google Analytics has a wide range of features. Depending on the depth you want to get into and some of the complementary services you might use, such as Google Ads, there’s a lot of variation in terms of what you can do with the platform. That said, a few of the basics to know as part of understanding Google Analytics include:

Real-Time Reporting

Within Google Analytics, you can track in real-time what’s happening in terms of visitor activity. For example, if you’re running an ad campaign and want to see how that’s translating into people visiting your website, you can use Google Analytics’ real-time reporting capabilities to see how you’re performing. 

Acquisition and Behavior Reporting

Knowing how many people have viewed your website is certainly helpful, but to really grow your insurance sales, it’s good to know how you’re acquiring this traffic in the first place. So, within Google Analytics you can see how you acquire visitors, such as through search or social, and then analyze their behavior once they visit your site.

For example, understanding bounce rates through Google Analytics can help you determine if you’re driving traffic to pages that don’t resonate with your audience.

“Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server,” explains Google Analytics. In other words, a high bounce rate could mean you’re not getting much value out of your traffic, since they’re not exploring multiple pages on your website.

Demographics

To dive deeper into understanding who’s visiting your site, you can tap into the Demographics data that Google Analytics provides. That way, you can understand things like the city your visitors tend to come from and their age. This data isn’t always comprehensive, but it could point you in the right direction to then create more relevant content. Or, if you’re seeing that you’re getting most of your website traffic from out of state or even out of the country, for example, where you might not be able to sell policies, then you may want to recalibrate your marketing efforts to draw in more local leads. 

Audience Reporting

Not only can you track how many visitors you get, but you can also create custom audiences to better understand user behavior. For example, you might want to track repeat activity among those who have visited your site within the past week, which could give you an indicator of how you’re doing in terms of progressing leads through the funnel. Prospects might not buy a policy on their first visit to your website, but if you can make them aware of your brand and keep them coming back, you could be on a path to more insurance sales.

How to Read the Google Analytics Dashboard

Understanding the main Google Analytics dashboard is fairly intuitive. You can scroll through and click around to view different metrics, such as the number of users, average engagement time, demographic data, and more. If you’re unsure what any data point means, odds are you can quickly figure that out either within the platform or through a brief online search.

For example, within the Google Analytics dashboard, you’ll sometimes see a symbol of a question mark within a circle that appears next to the heading of a metric. To see what that measure means, simply hover over that question mark and Google will provide more clarity.

If you don’t like the default view of your Google Analytics dashboard, you can also customize it, such as if you want a certain type of metric or timeline to appear on your Analytics homepage. That said, you should first clarify your sales and marketing goals to make sure your dashboard provides the most help to your insurance agency.

“Before you even think about touching a custom Google dashboard, you’ll need to do some serious thinking about what metrics are most important to you. Identify the KPIs (key performance indicators) that are the best proxies for your mission — the data outputs that best predict your desired organizational outcomes,” advises Whole Whale, a social impact digital agency.

Understanding Google Analytics Reports

In some ways, dashboards and reports are used interchangeably, as you can see reports within Google Analytics dashboards. However, you can also download reports from Google Analytics, such as if you want to review these with other staff in your agency or discuss them with a marketing consultant. You also can easily generate custom reports if you want to include specific data that are not in a standard view. 

Just go to the “Reports snapshot” tab within Google Analytics, then click on the pencil symbol that will say “Customize report” when you hover over it. From there, you can drag and drop the metrics you want to add, ranging from “Users by age” to “User engagement.”

You can also do the same type of customization process when clicking on other Reports tabs, such as “Engagement overview” or “Acquisition overview.”

What Does It Mean That Cookies Are Going Away?

Google is planning to end support for third-party cookies within its Chrome browser. Some other browsers like Firefox already allow users to disable third-party cookies, which can otherwise track users from site to site. But first-party cookies, ones you collect directly from your website and which Google Analytics uses, will still be allowed. In other words, you don’t have to worry too much. Some specific tracking capabilities may change, but by and large, you should still be able to get a good sense of what’s happening with your traffic.

Google Analytics Training and Certifications

Lastly, if you want to get the most out of Google Analytics, there are many educational resources available to help you learn the ins and outs so you can use it to your utmost advantage. For, one Google offers Analytics Academy, which is a series of free online courses to help you better understand Google Analytics and receive certificates of completion. 

You can also go through training and certification through several free or relatively low-cost online options. This can range from watching explainer videos on YouTube to taking a course through a platform like Coursera or LinkedIn Learning.

But you don’t necessarily have to go through a ton of training before you get started. Even just reading Google’s help documents can be enough for you to begin using the platform so you can at least get an overview of your traffic. From there, you might decide to learn more along the way so you can get more out of your online marketing.