How do Tech insurance websites get traffic?

As a startup tech insurance company it is important that we understand how other large companies in the industry drive traffic to their websites. Traffic is key to success if you are hoping to rely on the internet for your sales. It is the top of the funnel which later becomes leads, conversions and sales. For the sake of this report we will analyze and compare the websites of several leaders in the industry: policygenius.com, thezebra.com, ethoslife.com, insurify.com, www.quotacy.com, and last but defiantly not least lemonade.com.

How to compare traffic sources between websites?

I chose to use the tool Similarweb a powerful research tool for online marketing which aggregates data about websites and their traffic source. Since the free tool is limited in its comparison capabilities, I collected key the key metrics and organized them in an excel sheet.

policygenius overview

The first thing you can see about each website is the overview. Basic information is displayed such as website ranking, total visits, bounce rate and more. When we compare our target websites side by side on these basic metrics we can see the following:

lemonade outranks the other websites by far with a competitive bounce rate. quotacy comes out as quite a small fish and we will see how that plays out when it comes to traffic sources.

the zebra traffic sources

Next we can see a breakdown of traffic sources. In terms of location, all of the websites we are looking at have an overwhelming majority of their traffic coming from the US (lemonade with slightly less but still above 80%). When we look at the traffic source it is broken down by Direct, Referrals, Search, Social, Mail, Display (ads). As you can see below for all of the websites (with the exception of ethoslife) Search was the #1 source of traffic, closely followed by direct traffic (i.e someone navigates directly to the website).

Within the search category we can analyze what kind of search it was - paid or organic. As we can see below most of the search traffic is organic with paid search around 25% and much below in most cases. We can also take a look at the top keywords for each kind.

We can see below that the top organic keywords for insurify were related to car insurance. This case is an exception as for most of the websites the top 3 keywords in both organic and paid search included the specific name of the website (such as #1 for organic searches of insurify below)

insurify search traffic

What does social media tell us?

A breakdown of social traffic also reveals some interesting insights.

Each company seems to have a very different social strategy. policygenius is focused on YouTube, ethoslife and quotacy on Facebook, insurify on reddit and thezebra uses a mix. Most of the companies dabble in Linkedin and as you can see below lemonade also is prominent on Pocket the personal news aggregator.

lemonade social sources

Nonetheless, social is not a primary source for any of the websites accounting for 2-4% of the traffic on average. It still does rank even higher than display ads in most cases as seen below. It is interesting to see that even with display advertising and paid search combined - advertising accounts for only a tiny fraction of the traffic.

So how do these websites drive traffic if not through advertising?

One of the answers may lie in the referrals metric. Referral traffic is traffic that comes to a website through links on another site. This is a double whammy because it both drives people to your website, and increases your websites authority meaning it will rank higher in searches. In most cases referrals accounted for only 6-9% of the traffic (which is still higher than social, paid ads etc.), but in some cases it was extremely high such as with ethoslife.

ethoslife referrals breakdown

Some of the referrals are just comparison websites or blogs which are both common forms of referral. The top source though in this case is MediaAlpha an online marketing agency. This means that even though it was categorized under referrals by Similarweb it is actually a paid form of traffic. The way in which MediaAlpha drives leads to the advertisers website may be more complex or unique than simple display ads, what leads it to be categorized as “referrals”.

Last but not least is direct traffic. People are navigating to these websites because they are familiar with the brand or are already customers in need of the websites utilities. Much of the organic search traffic can also be attributed to direct traffic as the search terms include the name of the company. This means the surfer has already determined their destination much like in the case of direct traffic. This implies that even for tech companies, brand awareness, offline advertising and marketing, and word of mouth are also an important component of online success.