Smaller Auto Insurance Companies Seeing Steep Growth: comScore
Posted on March 29th, 2011
The internet revolution has changed the face of modern business in an irrevocable fashion, and the auto insurance industry has not been left behind, with the major insurers using web tools to further advance their dominance of the market. However, that may be changing, according to a recent report by prominent consumer research company comScore.
Shopping for auto insurance quotes and comparing rates online has been common practice for years, but smaller insurers had not seen much increase in their traffic, until now. According to the study by comShare, smaller auto insurers are now experiencing larger customer volume, directly attributable to web-driven advertising methods. Also, the general practice of using online quotes and patronizing online agencies has seen a significant upward trend.
Analyzing visitor statistics for 14 small- to mid-sized automobile insurance providers such as Unitrin Direct, USAA and American Family, comScore compared the figures for total unique visitors to those companies’ sites during the fourth quarters of 2009 and 2010. What comScore found was that all of the sites experienced an increase of nearly 70% in the fourth quarter of 2010 over the figures from the same quarter in 2009. In terms of numbers, the sites had combined totals of almost 12.5 million unique individuals, a staggering figure.
Of the 14 sites polled, more than 50% of them doubled their normal traffic figures during that quarter of 2010.
This report was a first for comScore, who had never previously published visitor figures from these smaller insurers. They had released figures from another 13 insurers in years past, but those companies which were profiled were larger, such as Allstate and 21st Century.
When contrasted with the numbers from the larger sites, the smaller companies’ traffic comprised approximately 17.5% of the total traffic of all the sites combined.
Susan Klein, comScore’s director, commented that these increased traffic numbers for smaller auto insurance companies could represent a major shift in the online insurance industry.
“The online auto insurance market has been dominated by only a handful of insurers over the past few years, with GEICO and Progressive [accounting for] over 50 percent of all quotes submitted online,” she said. “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.”
Several insurance aggregator sites, those which give potential customers the ability to price shop and purchase car insurance over the internet, also reported an increase in traffic in the latter part of 2010 over the previous year’s numbers, although the contrast was not as dramatic as the analysis of the individual smaller companies’ numbers.
Of the nine aggregator websites, the unique visitor traffic for the fourth quarter of 2010 was 35% more than for the same period in 2009. In total, comScore stipulated that the aggregator sites and the small- to mid-sized insurance sites was 724,000 quotes for the last quarter of 2010. Previously, the difference between 2008 and 2009 in the same area was only about 20%.
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