It’s time to get a little bit tactical. On the Compete blog, we talk about data all the time, but very rarely do we actually “show” and not just “tell.” I get pretty fired up about Compete PRO, and the latest enhancements to Search Analytics provide a great excuse to devote an entire post to my favorite Compete PRO report: Keyword Destination.

Call it shameless self-promotion, but as far as I’m concerned, no online marketer can live without Keyword Destination, which sheds light on where people go downstream after searching for specific keywords. I looked at some of the reports as they applied to the insurance industry, taking the perspective of GEICO, a major player in the space. Lots of different ways to use the report, but here are three simple ways to uncover meaningful clues and take some action off the data:

1) Competitive keyword strategy

What is the most important keyword to your business? Does it have the highest volume? Highest conversion? How important is it to your competitors? I took a look at the keyword “auto insurance” (obviously valuable to GEICO) to see where people go after searching.

From the output, it is clear that there’s a lot of competitive activity around the keyword “auto insurance”, with geico.com getting 9.83% of downstream referrals, esurance.com getting 8.91%, progressive.com claiming 8.2%, and statefarm.com getting 5.05%. Looking at the paid vs. natural breakdown, GEICO and progressivedirect.com get over 50% of referrals for the keyword through paid search, whereas sites like statefarm.com and thegeneral.com drive over 90% of clicks organically. This is great competitive information that GEICO can use to make some strategic search decisions.

2) Brand Management

GEICO has spent millions offline, with creative campaigns including everything from cavemen to geckos to  stacks of dollar bills with eyeballs, all great in keeping the big insurance provider top of mind with consumers. But what happens when that brand awareness translates into Search? In other words, when consumers actually look for your brand, where do they end up after clicking? Check out the results for geico:

Good news for GEICO is that geico.com gets about 90% of all traffic for the keyword. However, there are 190 other sites getting that remaining 10% of downstream traffic. While the image above shows the highest volume downstream sites (primarily portals and Social Networks), GEICO is also losing branded traffic to other insurance sites, aggregators, and affiliates.

3) Media Planning and Partnership Development

Regardless of what industry you play in, you want to know where to showcase your ads across the millions of content oriented sites out there. While the major sites are obvious spots for those big upfront buys, there are thousands of highly relevant torso and longer tail sites where you can have a valuable presence.

Let’s look at the generic keyword “insurance” to see where people go when they search.

Compete picked up over 53,000 sites getting broad match traffic from the keyword “insurance,” the highest volume downstream sites listed above. Clearly some insurance providers in the mix, but a good amount of traffic finds its way to portals and social networks.

So how can an insurance company like GEICO find opportunities to increase coverage and reach those valuable consumers searching for insurance? I filtered the list to see just the highest volume sites getting 100% of natural traffic share from the keyword “insurance,” the highest volume of which are listed below.

Bam!  If you’re GEICO, you immediately have a punch list of several thousand sites getting traffic organically for a hugely relevant keyword to your business. You can reach out to these sites to forge partnerships and alliances, incorporate those that are content specific and ad supported in your media plans, and even potentially find new distribution partners for your products.

The Keyword Destination report is one of many reports you can run with Compete PRO to get the critical business information you need to compete more effectively.

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