Most of the tools we talk about stocking your insurance website with are there to help attract, generate, and then convert leads into clients. Once you've sealed the client deal, there are then others you can incorporate into your website to help build that strong client relationship that's so necessary for success.

Sounds like an excellent plan, doesn't it?

Well, it would if it weren't missing one key ingredient: measurement.

Measuring performance is an essential step in any good marketing strategy - online or otherwise. Without feedback, it's impossible to know whether you're on the right track. You can push your content through social media channels and add lead generation forms all over your website all you like, but if you can't tell how well they're working, you might as well not bother.

Which is why you need to add one more tool - Google Analytics - to your online marketing arsenal.

A quick definition straight from the horse's mouth:

“Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. It’s the most widely used website statistics service. The basic service is free of charge and a premium version is available for a fee.”

Thanks to Google Analytics, the efficacy of your website and the subsequent tools you integrate with can be measured. Ultimately it helps identify the ROI on your web presence, allowing you to manage your online time and money better by avoiding initiatives that aren’t driving or converting traffic.

If you're working from an Advisor Websites platform, Google Analytics' page tracking service comes pre-integrated with your advisor or insurance website. If you're not, thankfully installation is fairly straightforward since tinkering around with web page code can be intimidating for beginners and fellow Luddites alike.

Check out this step-by-step guide on how to integrate your insurance website with Google Analytics - just try not to get overwhelmed, it's mostly a lot of copy and pasting. After Google Analytics is up and running, the statistics will start rolling in.

One of the most important places to keep and eye on is the means through which your web visitors are accessing your site. Google Analytics identifies four main entry points in the Acquisition section:

Organic traffic: when a visitor arrives at your site from a search engine like Google, it is organic traffic, which indicates how good your SEO is.
Referral traffic: referral traffic comes from a link on another website, like the Better Business Bureau or Angie’s List.
Direct traffic: visitors arrive at your website because they typed your URL directly into their browser or clicked on a link in an email.
Social traffic: visitors who arrive to your site from social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn are categorized as social traffic.

Along with where your traffic is coming from, Google Analytics tells you exactly how visitors are using every inch of your website - outlining, among other things, how long visitors stay, what they click on, and which pages are most popular.

Google Analytics will tell you how well your integrations are working on your website. For instance, low numbers in places could mean that you should try publishing different content or that you need to move your lead capture form to a more visible location.

So just remember, that while a steady increase in web traffic leads to more conversion opportunities, regularly measuring your website’s performance in those areas is key to continued growth.