Newer Web Sites Gaining Online Auto Insurance Market Share
Newer auto insurance and aggregator sites are attracting an increasing share of the online auto insurance market that has been dominated by GEICO and Progressive, according to a new report.
In the fourth quarter of 2010, these additional sites accounted for 724,000 submitted quotes, making up 8 percent of quotes submitted online, reports comScore.com, a Reston, Virginia-based firm that specializes in benchmarking online sales.
“The online auto insurance market has been dominated by only a handful of insurers over the past few years, with GEICO and Progressive comprising over 50 percent of all quotes submitted online,” said comScore director Susan Kleinman. “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 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.
USAA.com led the way among the set of additional sites with 6.5 million visitors, followed by American Family (1.3 million visitors) and Mercury Insurance (686,000 visitors).
Other newer insurance company entries into the online auto insurance marketplace include CSAA.com, DirectGeneral.com, SafeCo.com, Amica.com, ErieInsurance.com, InfinityAuto.com, GMACInsurance.com, UnitrinDirect.com, Auto-Owners.com, CommerceInsurance.com and TitanInsurancec.om.
Auto insurers that have been online for awhile and are not considered new entries by comScore include 21st.com, allstate.com, esurance.com, geico.com, libertymutual.com, nationwide.com, progressive.com, progressiveagent.com, safeauto.com, statefarm.com, thegeneral.com, thehartford.com and travelers.com.
In addition to the growing number of individual 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 the fourth quarter 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 analytics firm comScore’s 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.