Aggregation Metrics: Consumer Approaches to Insurance Comparison Sites in Canada

Based on a survey of over 1,000 consumers, Aggregation Metrics: Consumer Approaches to Online Insurance Comparison Sites in Canada offers new insights into the current development and future prospects of online insurance comparison sites in Canada. It examines consumer propensity to research and purchase any kind of insurance online plus the size of the available market for the key products of auto and home insurance, as defined by new customers and switchers; it then analyses the distribution channels and interfaces used for acquiring these policies, highlighting both the share of aggregators, in particular, and the share of online sales, in general, including indicators for the speed at which these are growing.

Moreover, it investigates the extent to which online insurance buyers in Canada are using tablets or mobile phones for this purpose, as opposed to regular laptop or desktop computers, and establishes whether propensity to use aggregators is influenced by a range of variables including not only gender, age, annual household income and employment status but also type of cover held, differentiating between standard and non-standard policies and (for auto insurance only) between telematics-enabled policies and not telematics-enabled policies. In addition, it benchmarks the performance of eight of the leading insurance comparison sites in Canada in terms of awareness levels, conversion rates and sales.

Key features of this report and the consumer data file that accompanies it include:

• unique data showing whether Canadian consumers use one, two, three or up to seven or more sites when researching insurance products;
• standardised figures illustrating distribution channels employed for acquiring auto and home insurance, differentiating between 'available' customers buying for the first time or switching provider and customers simply renewing a policy bought in a previous year;
• similar statistics showing the distribution interfaces used in Canada for the same two policy types with a split between sales in a face-to-face setting, online sales, phone sales (both inbound and outbound) and postal sales;
• performance benchmarking for eight of the leading aggregators – namely, ClicAssure, ComparaSave, InsuranceHotline.com, Kanetix, LowestRates.ca, RateLab.ca, RateSupermarket.ca and Shop Insurance Canada – in order to indicate rates of recognition, usage to research insurance and usage to actually buy insurance;
• survey results specific to non-standard auto and home insurance – including a breakdown of the reasons why some Canadian customers have non-standard cover – plus (for auto insurance) data concerning telematics-enabled policies.