Insurance Traffic Trends

As an intro to a piece we are doing about insurance and the social side of the internet, I wanted to highlight a few areas where insurance companies are still stuck in the dark ages.
Trends – simple stuff. There are tons of resources that allow anyone to see what the market is doing. Yet few people are using this information to their advantage.

Insurance is well known to be seasonal. Depending on the product group, this could be due to winter/summer holidays, new car registration months or a surge in consumer spending amongst others. This time of year is popular amongst those who have eaten too much over Christmas! Just look at the guaranteed peaks at the beginning of the year for [gym] or [diet].

Are you part of the marketing team for a website? Are you changing your online spend as a result of this guaranteed information?

Useful Resources

Google Trends

• UK Car Insurance Trends
• Motorcycle Insurance Trends
• Ski Insurance Trends

Microsoft adCenter Labs

Demographics on Car Insurance Searches

Yahoo Top Trends and Buzz

• Delicious Top Trends
• Yahoo Buzz

BlogPulse (from Nielsen BuzzMetrics)

Car Insurance Trends on BlogPulse

IceRocket

Ice Rocket Home Insurance Trends

Omgili

Omgili Chatter on [credit cards] and [loans]

TheAA Insurance Premium Index

FeedCompare

 http://www.feedcompare.com

What next?

We’re just scratching the surface here – there are plenty more nuggets out there. Care to suggest any for our avid readers (or would you rather keep it a secret)?

Trends appear not just on a large scale but on a smaller scale as well. Have you analysed your PPC/Marketing/CRM campaigns by hour of the day? You might find that the conversion is wildly different and therefore the spend should be different as well. If you’re a little sneaky, you may find that some Yahoo (Panama) keywords get accepted (when they are normally rejected) as the manual reviewers have gone home!

Don’t just look at the volume – take a look at the conversion. It’s no use getting a ton of paid traffic which doesn’t turn in to sales. Much of this will be old hat to most of you but everyone has to start somewhere…