01
2010
Where in the UK are financial aggregator websites most popular?
Another guest blog from Richard Seymour, Experian Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst.
In the table below we can see where in the UK financial aggregators are most used. The representation shows the areas which over-index compared to the UK population. In this case we can see that residents of Sunderland are most over-represented in visits to financial aggregators compared to their general internet usage. Behind Sunderland, the North is well represented in the ten most over-indexed areas – particularly the North-West, with Liverpool, Bolton, Preston, Blackpool and Wigan all heavily over-represented in visits to financial aggregators.
However, financial aggregators are less used in London, as the bottom 10 shows above. All London postal areas are significantly underrepresented when it comes to visits to financial aggregators.
Interestingly, however, when compared to a custom category of insurance providers, London – WC appears as the 8th most over-indexed postal area. So, as a rule, those in London – WC do not use financial aggregators heavily, but they do use them more than using insurance providers’ sites directly.
When compared to visits to insurance providers, Sunderland again appears as the most over-indexed postal area, showing that users there would prefer to shop around and compare deals than go direct to insurance providers. In Sunderland financial aggregators are presumably doing a good job in filtering people towards the best deals or products that suit their situation in that area.
The opposite is true for Liverpool. Whilst Liverpudlians are the second-most over-indexed in visits to financial aggregators, they are the most under-indexed when compared to visits to insurance providers, showing that they prefer to go to insurance providers direct – or that they visit multiple insurance providers from the comparison sites.
The original version of this article appeared in the latest edition of the Experian Hitwise UK Financial Services Quarterly Review. To download a copy of the report, click here.
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Robin, Another great post. It would be interesting to expand this data set to see if people are searching for local brokers instead of online comparison sites.
Another interesting comparison would be to look at online vs. offline advertising spend from the major comparison sites broken down by region – to see whether this has affected the data.
George from Insiders View the Insurance Blog
For “financial aggregators” are we talking comparison sites such as MoneySupermarket, GoCompare and Confused.com?
Don’t Hitwise put Moneysavingexpert at c50% of the visits to financial aggregators? And if so, if you take MSM out, do results change?
Interesting stuff as usual Robin,
Can you let us know how you have discovered that a particular person lives in say, Sunderland, for example? Do you have the location details of the actual Internet user (along with their online activity) or are you using their IP address? If the latter, then would a high prevailance of datacentres in Sunderland substantially skew the figures? For example, I am currently “geolocated” as being in London – wrong to the tune of about 170 miles.
Thanks,
Andy.
Very interesting, would it be people in London are subjected to more advertising and therefore shop around more?
Have to agree with Andy on this one, how are the locations being found? Would also be really interesting to know which sort of financial products are being sought in which areas. For example, would pay day loans be more popular in less wealthier parts of the UK?
To me it seems that it is the poorer areas that are using the aggregation sites more than the more affluent south.
Kind of makes sense if they are trying harder to save money any way they can.
Just an observation