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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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The role of paid search and comparison sites in the insurance sector

July 14, 2009

The insurance industry relies on paid search traffic more than most other online sectors. During June 2009, 33.0% of all the UK Internet traffic that insurance websites received from search engines came via paid clicks. That paid search rate is much higher than the UK average of 8.6%, and also more than comparable industries such as banking (15.3%), retail (20.7%) and travel (21.1%). However, despite this, the last 12 months have seen a steep decline in paid search rates in the UK insurance market; in June 2008, the paid search rate was 43.7%.

With products ranging from basic travel cover to complex life and health policies, the insurance market is extremely varied; but search rates are pretty consistent across all products. The orange line on the chart below illustrates the paid search rates on five portfolios of search terms relating to different insurance products over the 12 weeks ending 06/06/09. The only exception is health insurance, where the paid rate is notably lower (roughly 40% compared with 50% for the other products).

insurance_comparison_sites_and_paid_search_rates_data_2009_chart.png

The main reason that health insurance is different to the other portfolios is because a lot of the traffic goes to NHS sites, which are less likely to pay for clicks than commercial operators. This trend also has an impact on the second data set in the chart above: the blue line, which represents the amount of traffic from searches for terms in those portfolios that went to comparison sites, such as Money Supermarket, GoCompare, Confused.com and Compare the Market. However, with this second data set it is not only health insurance searches that differ from the average.

Aside from health insurance, there is a significant variance in the amount of traffic that searches for different insurance products send to comparison sites. Whereas over two-fifths of searches for home and motor insurance end up at a comparison site, people searching for travel insurance and other insurance products (which includes specialist general products such as pet insurance, as well as life policies) are much more likely to go directly to a provider or broker site.

Looking at the insurance market as a whole, it is clearly becoming more reliant on finance comparison sites for traffic. The largest portion of traffic to insurance providers’ homepages comes from search engines (40.2% during June 2009), but the amount of traffic that they receive from finance comparison sites is also increasing. As the chart below illustrates, 7.5% of a typical insurance provider’s homepage traffic came from finance comparison sites in June 2009, up from 5.8% a year before. Finance comparison sites now supply insurance providers with over twice the amount of traffic that webmail services provide.

insurance_websites_sources_of_uk_traffic_2009_2008_chart.png