2020 was a year that forced many financial brands to change habits. In record numbers, businesses and individuals turned to the internet during lockdowns, leading to never-before-seen levels of online traffic. This trend held true for financial brands as well. With levels of online visitors expected to remain high in 2021, we’ve put together three web traffic trends for Financial Brands to watch in 2021.
Keeping the following tips in mind can help financial marketers adjust their content and search strategy for greater effectiveness. Be sure to subscribe to Social Assurance’s blog subscription to get our insights delivered straight to your inbox.
Increased First-Time Site Visitors
A contributor to the online traffic growth was the increase in new users. New users grew by 20% in 2020 alone, dwarfing the 8% rise in 2019 and the 5% gain in 2018.
It’s important to understand the behavior of these new users, as they can help financial brands learn how to better market their services and products. It can also help discover site exploration trends.
Google Analytics provides a number of tools to help financial brands understand the impact of these new users. One of the more helpful tools is the Users Flow report. This can be found under the Audience tab. This report allows you to segment the user flow by new users to gain an understanding of what pages they interacted with, where they left your website, and which pages led to conversions. You can analyze this data by a number of attributes such as source/medium, geographic location, landing page, and more. It’s a treasure trove of information for helping marketers improve.
Pro Tip
Integrate an online analytics tool with your website. As digital trends increase, learning the behavior patterns of your audience will be critical to your marketing success.
More Website Traffic from Mobile Devices
Digital device usage has grown steadily over the past decade. More people are using multiple devices each day, sometimes in one sitting. In 2015, 31% of online traffic came from a mobile device. Last year, mobile devices accounted for 51%. For financial brands specifically, mobile device users grew by 23% in 2020, compared to the previous year.
This trend significantly impacts your website design and structure. With more visits coming from mobile users, you want to ensure that users have a good experience on your site.
In your Google Analytics, you can find how much of your audience is coming via mobile in your Mobile Overview report. You can access this under Audience -> Mobile -> Overview.
You can analyze which pages on your website are receiving the bulk of your mobile visits in the All Pages report. You can access this under Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages. Do a secondary dimension filter for device category.
Pro Tip
Optimizing your webpages for mobile users will also impact your organic search rankings. Google prefers mobile friendly sites and pages and gives these sights higher average search results. To improve what page your brand shows up on Google, make your sight more mobile friendly.
Search Rankings Will Play a Greater Role
Sessions coming from search engines are increasing. Across industries, search engines account for 68% of all website visits. For financial brands specifically, sessions attributed to organic search grew by 15% in 2020.
This trend tells us that our online audience is conducting more online research than before. Whether it’s about brands or products, users are interested in exploring their options before committing to one brand. This means that, if your brand isn’t ranking well for search, you are missing on valuable customer opportunities.
You can determine your website traffic’s particular interests by analyzing your search trends. This can found by seeing the pages a user visited during their session. However, knowing your traffic’s search keywords could prove more helpful. You can see search query insights by linking your Google Analytics account to the Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a tool that provides deeper insights into your website visitors. It provides how your pages are ranking in search results, what search queries bring your pages and performance metrics, such as impressions and click through rates.
Pro Tip
Insights into search queries would allow you to know which terms you want to optimize your pages for or to use in a paid search campaign. This could better guide your marketing efforts and improve your budget ROI.
2021 provides a wealth of new market and expansion opportunities for financial brands. Hand in hand with search trends, social media predictions for this year are also new. To find more information on what this year could hold, and how your financial brand should prepare, download our free Marketing and Compliance Report now.
