The General Insurance has seen conversions increasingly grow as the company experiments, tests and improves features on its mobile site.

Mobile traffic to The General’s site has grown by 48 percent in the last year, and since improving the navigation of the mobile site, conversions have increased 4.79 percent. The General uses Adobe tools to analyze how consumers interact with both its mobile and desktop site so that it can constantly improve the experience for consumers.

“We do see a difference between how customers interact with our mobile site and our full site,” said Chrystal Garrison, Web site optimization specialist at The General Insurance, Nashville, TN.

“Our main goal, in the mobile site, when we first launched it, we were responding to a growing segment of traffic, and once we launched a site that specifically addresses that segment we got a much better response,” she said. “From there we continued to improve upon it.

“Looking at areas where people get stuck on the mobile Web site and try to improve it as much as we can. The more that mobile traffic grows the more that we focus on that area.”

The General sells automobile insurance in 27 states in the U.S.

Test and improve
The General launched a mobile site in the spring of 2012. Simply creating a mobile-specific site alone increased traffic and conversions, but the company has since placed a bigger emphasis on optimizing the site for mobile.

To improve the site, The General uses Adobe Analytics to obtain data about how consumers interact with the site, to see, for example, how long consumers spend on a specific page and if they actually convert or not. Then, The General uses Adobe Target to test out new features and solutions before rolling it out completely.

“We really are a data-driven organization, we use data to drive our decisions as we make changes to the Web site,” Ms. Garrison said. “It allows us to see where customers are having issues, which provides us with an opportunity to improve areas of the site that are having those issues.

For instance, if The General notices a lot of drop off on a particular page, the company will invest more on improving it to help make the flow to conversion easier for consumers on mobile.

One specific example is on the home page, consumers can receive a quote and if they want it, they can purchase insurance.

The General realized that it needed to make this page friendlier to attract consumers, so it changed the format of how it looked. Before, it was more data-heavy and just gave the consumer a number, but The General changed it to add a friendlier message that explains the number consumers see and what it means.

By changing the wording of the quote page, mobile conversions increased 7.91 percent and conversions for returning customers increased 9.28 percent.

General improvements
Another change The General made was adding a security logo on every page of the quote and buy flow. This gave consumers more confidence in proceeding with the conversion process.

By adding the security logo, The General saw a 10.11 percent lift in non-mobile conversions and 16.34 percent for returning customers.

The General is simultaneously working on its desktop and mobile site, but the company is placing more of a priority on mobile after seeing how important the medium is becoming.

“Our customers have become more and more willing to spend time on their phones performing transactions that they used to perform on desktop,” Ms. Garrison said. “As mobile becomes more important to them it becomes more important to us.

“As a company, we’ve really made mobile a priority because we can see from the data that that’s where the market is going,” she said. “We are responding by putting more resources towards our mobile presence and always making it easier for customers to use our Web site to purchase insurance online.

“We want to be on top of any trends that will make it easier for customers to purchase with The General. We plan to continue to improve our mobile experience and invest in that going forward.”

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York