Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

ComScore released its annual report on online insurance shopping last month. The company presented its findings at the Auto Insurance Report 2009, sponsored by Risk Information, Inc.

A whopping 32 million consumers used the Internet to submit a quote request for auto insurance last year, which was about the same number as the previous year. In the years before, comScore reported the growth rate of quote requests increasing about 15 percent annually.

Last year, of course, was a different kind of year. But even in this economic retraction era, seven percent more people purchased auto insurance online than the previous year.

And there are millions using the Internet to start researching insurance before they request a quote. According to Google, in April the keyword ‘auto insurance’ was used as a search word 30 million times. ‘Auto insurance quote’ and ‘auto insurance quotes’ were shown to comprise another 6 million or so searches.

These statistics fluctuate and aren’t 100 percent accurate; but suffice it to say, there are a huge number of potentially interested consumers checking out insurance through the search engines.

Of course, with the growing number of consumers online, there is a growing (exploding) number of insurance marketers online. If a consumer enters the search term ‘auto insurance’ in Google, there are over 90 million matches (links to Web pages).

So in essence, there are 90 million sources of information for people researching insurance offerings (98 million for ‘car insurance’). The search engines list those 90 million links in a particular order, based on a number of (secret) criteria; but you can imagine it takes a lot of marketing savvy to rank in the first couple of page results. Most consumers don’t venture much past the first few listings.

The Internet has become congested with information—so much so that it is very difficult for consumers to find what they are looking for. But it is even worse for small businesses—and insurance agents—to try and be noticed when there are so many distractions.

But watch out for someone who promises guaranteed results: no one can guarantee anything with search engines, and there are plenty of shysters taking people for a ride when it comes to Internet marketing services.

Internet insurance shopping: friend or foe? The verdict is still out.