Today we present another guest post from Richard Seymour, Experian Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst. The data is based on the excellent research that he carried out for our recent UK Insurance webinar.
The chart below illustrates searches for portfolios containing well over 1000 terms relating to Motor Insurance, Health insurance, Home Insurance, Travel Insurance, and Other insurance (which contains the smaller insurance products, primarily life and pet insurance). As you can see, Motor is the most searched for type of insurance in the UK, typically receiving between two and three times the volume of Travel, the next most popular type.

Last year searches for Motor Insurance increased from Christmas onwards – racing towards the new car registration dates in March before slowly decreasing and finally dropping off just after the second round of registrations in September. However, due to the government scrappage scheme, this year there has been an increase in interest in the motor insurance sector since the New Year, including between March and September, and searches have yet to drop off like they did last year.
Looking into the portfolio in a bit more depth, we can see that 17% of all Motor Insurance searches are currently for the most popular term, ‘car insurance’. However, as the chart below illustrates, during the 12 weeks ending October 3rd 2009, Motor Insurance had the highest proportion of branded search terms amongst all the portfolios, with ‘tesco car insurance’, ‘direct line car insurance’ and ‘go compare car insurance’ the most popular.

The blue line on the chart above illustrates the paid rate on each of these portfolios, and in each case it is either just above or below 50%. Paid search rates are higher in Insurance than any other online sector, illustrating just how competitive and fast moving the market is. Given the nature of the market, it is informative to understand the importance of popular keywords, and the chart below shows the prevalence of certain keywords in searches for motor insurance and the change since last year.

The word ‘car’ appears in 90% of all searches, and this hasn’t changed over the past year. Search terms with the word ‘cheap’ have decreased by 32% over the past year whilst searches with the word ‘compare’ have increased by 92%. Of course this doesn’t show that consumers are not looking for cheap deals anymore, what it shows is that they are confident that they are able to find cheap deals whilst comparing providers on a comparison site.
This analysis is taken from our recent Insurance Webinar, but is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of data! Other topics covered included: analysis of the other insurance products highlighted in the chart at the start of the post, the top insurance sites in the UK, the role of brand, the importance of comparison sites, the role of social media and online customer segmentation. You can listen to recording of the webinar for free here.
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