Previously dominated by only a handful of insurers, the competitive landscape is changing for insurers and aggregators in the online auto insurance space. comScore, Inc., a digital measurement and analytics firm, announced the availability of an expanded competitive set of insurers and aggregator sites for its online auto insurance benchmarker. In Q4 2010, these additional sites accounted for 724,000 submitted quotes, making up 8% of quotes submitted online.
Until recently, notes comScore Director Susan Kleinman, GEICO and Progressive comprising more than 50% of all quotes submitted online. “But as more consumers look to the Internet to shop for insurance policies, there is an opportunity for more insurers to break into the online market.”
The comScore online auto insurance benchmarker includes key metrics such as visitation and quoting activity for insurance sites. The expanded set of sites saw growth across the board over the past year, with many sites achieving triple-digit gains.
In addition to the growing number of insurers expanding their reach online, additional insurance aggregators (online agencies and online lead generators) have grown their share of the online auto insurance market due to the entrance of newcomers and the acquisition of existing sites by competitors.
In Q4 2010, aggregator All Web Leads attracted 6.8 million unique visitors to its sites. Its most visited sites were USInsuranceOnline.com (1.8 million visitors), GiveMeInsuranceQuotes.com (1.3 million visitors), and Discount-Car-Insurance-Rates.com (1.2 million visitors). CarInsurance.com (574,000 visitors) and InsureMeOnline.com (416,000 visitors) also attracted sizeable audiences.
The expanded comScore report covers visitation metrics for the sites above and will also include online initiated and submitted quotes for All Web Leads domains, CarInsurance.com,
The comScore standard auto insurance benchmarker currently includes 13 insurance sites and 7 aggregator sites and provides data on visitation, online quoting, online purchasing and many additional reports such as source of traffic, cross shopping, online servicing, and demographics.
