Emerging auto insurance and aggregator sites attracting meaningful market share

"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% 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."

Visitation to additional auto insurance sites

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. USAA.com (which includes content on all of its products and services apart from insurance) 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).

*Insurer industry includes: 21st.com, allstate.com, esurance.com, geico.com, libertymutual.com, nationwide.com, progressive.com, progressiveagent.com, safeauto.com, statefarm.com, thegeneral.com, thehartford.com, travelers.com.

Insurance aggregator landscape changing

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.

*All Web Leads includes all domains owned by All Web Leads
**Traffic also included in All Web Leads

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, Amica (Amica.com), the Automobile Club of Southern California (Calif.AAA.com), Direct General (DirectGeneral.com), Farmers (Farmers.com), Unitrin Direct Auto Insurance (UnitrinDirect.com), and USAA (USAA.com).

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.