Insurance searches on google
I work as a market analyst in the insurance industry, and found this information about web searches from Google Trends to be interesting regarding car and home insurance shopping search in the US on the web.
Trend history for searches "car insurance" and "home insurance"
In "Car Insurance"
- Note the consistent decline in searches in the last 3-4 months of every year for the past 4 years.
- overall search volume in 2007 seems a bit lower than 2004 to 2006 - this would be consistent with the feeling in the market in 2007 that maybe there's not as much shopping going on, and would confirm suspicions that there's not as much organic shopping going on when there's not much rate activity happening. It's a "soft market" right now.
- July/August seems to consistently see a little spike in searches - correlates with high production months for major insurers.
- note far lower volume of "home insurance" searches, and less degree of seasonality (although home insurance searches seem to fall off the last few months of the year like auto.
Anyhow, I know this is off topic for this blog, but I was looking at this for work and it seemed pretty interesting to me, thought it might be for the readers here also.
2 comments:
Shane,
I think your data is skewed as it includes all regions. You need to limit to the US only. The link you reference has more "hits" from the UK, Ireland, and Austrialia. It has an equal number from Canada. The graph looks more like this http://www.google.com/trends?q=car+insurance,+home+insurance&date=all&geo=usa&ctab=0&ctab=0&sa=N
Under the US only filter the 2007 hits are definately lower than 2004, but not really much different from 2005 and 2006. Q4 07 is the worst we have seen in a while, outside of Q4 05.
Homeowners has been pretty flat over the past few years.
I also thought it was interesting that if you changed the search from Car Insurance to Auto Insurance, the graphs told a different story. Hit's took a nosedive in Q3 04 and never recovered.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=auto+insurance%2C+home+insurance&ctab=0&geo=US&geor=all&date=all&sort=0
One last point of interest. Searches for the name of our company have gradually went up. I dont know is this is good or bad.
DD
Dude, you're fast. I just saw your message, but I changed the link to reflect U.S. only marketplace like 2 minutes after I posted.
You're right. The initial link was not filtered for geography and apparently places like England search for car insurance online alot.
Good point regarding auto insurance vs. car insurance. The drop-off in last part of 2007 is pretty noticeable regardless though.
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