Feb

13

Confused Million - Confused.com Million Pound Giveaway

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators, Marketing Insurance | 15 Comments

confused million Confused have pulled the ultimate marketing stunt - £1,000,000 to one lucky winner. One million pounds is a lot of money - just to fill out a car insurance form. You actually get two chances to win (once for home insurance, once for car insurance) and the details you provide obviously have to be accurate.

A few interesting points in the Ts&Cs:

You can obtain the winner’s name and county of residence by sending a stamped self-addressed envelope to us at Confused.com
Entries submitted through agents or third parties or in bulk will be ineligible
Employees/former employees … of Admiral Group Plc are not eligible to enter this prize draw.
The winner may be required, on an unpaid basis, to attend press conferences and other promotional events
The draw does not include motor or home insurance quotes made on other web sites that are powered by Confused.com.
We may use the information you supply us with for letting you know about:
- Our newsletter
- New product launches
- Reminder about our service next year
- Future surveys/research
- Personalised price update information in time for the next renewal
- Contact by
  - post
  - telephone
  - email
  - SMS

It’s still a cracking deal and I’m sure they’ll start marketing it properly soon - nothing on widespread media yet. That will sure test their systems and servers (and will likely take out many of the smaller brokers at the backend).

So, how can they afford this? Well, don’t forget, they’re owned by Admiral - no shortage there. What about the benefits to Confused:

Cross-Sell to other/new products
Re-Sale of leads to other parties such as CallConnection and LeadX
Sale of customer data to third parties (e.g. high earners such as gambling sites, adult sites, loans, mortgages, credit cards)
Customer Data for increased company worth
Customer ownership (additional marketing clout to make sure they remain leaders in the car insurance market)
Inbound links (this stunt is likely to increase ‘white-hat’ IBLs, no doubt encouraged by Neutralize)
To crush one of their competitors, GoCompare, who have recently received a massive Google penalty
As a sign of defiance to the latest FSA investigations

View the confused tv advert.

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Feb

11

Say What Now Broker Boy?

Filed Under Marketing Insurance | 4 Comments

It’s fair to say that cultures have been shaped and changed by messages being passed down through generations, altered and embellished, resulting in something altogether …well, frankly unbelievable. In which case, I wonder what the generations to follow us will make of the marketing messages being used by the running scared brokers of today?

OK, so it’s not exactly on a par with religion but the distance between reality and truth is comparable. The bastard cousin of the comparison sector is that CompareTheMarket actually claim to compare the market - directly, implied or cleverly disguised - whilst only comparing three insurance companies when you dissolve the brands with some Cilit Bang and run them through a hot cycle. You would have thought the many regulatory big brothers who look over all of us might have done something about this by now? Not so. But they’re not the only ones. Click to continue

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Jan

29

GoCompare Banned from Google

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators, SEO | 34 Comments

Go Compare and the GoCompare.com site have been banned from Google. As we reported on the 2nd January, GoCompare were appearing in the top spot for car insurance. It looks like Google may have found out about their Paid Links.

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Jan

5

Insurance Traffic Trends

Filed Under Marketing Insurance | 2 Comments

As an intro to a piece we are doing about insurance and the social side of the internet, I wanted to highlight a few areas where insurance companies are still stuck in the dark ages.
Trends - simple stuff. There are tons of resources that allow anyone to see what the market is doing. Yet few people are using this information to their advantage.

Insurance is well known to be seasonal. Depending on the product group, this could be due to winter/summer holidays, new car registration months or a surge in consumer spending amongst others. This time of year is popular amongst those who have eaten too much over Christmas! Just look at the guaranteed peaks at the beginning of the year for [gym] or [diet].

Are you part of the marketing team for a website? Are you changing your online spend as a result of this guaranteed information?

Useful Resources

Google Trends

Microsoft adCenter Labs

Demographics on Car Insurance Searches

Yahoo Top Trends and Buzz

TheAA Insurance Premium Index

FeedCompare

Feedcompare

http://www.feedcompare.com

What next?

We’re just scratching the surface here - there are plenty more nuggets out there. Care to suggest any for our avid readers (or would you rather keep it a secret)?

Trends appear not just on a large scale but on a smaller scale as well. Have you analysed your PPC/Marketing/CRM campaigns by hour of the day? You might find that the conversion is wildly different and therefore the spend should be different as well. If you’re a little sneaky, you may find that some Yahoo (Panama) keywords get accepted (when they are normally rejected) as the manual reviewers have gone home!

Don’t just look at the volume - take a look at the conversion. It’s no use getting a ton of paid traffic which doesn’t turn in to sales. Much of this will be old hat to most of you but everyone has to start somewhere…

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Jan

2

GoCompare at Number 1 for Car Insurance

Filed Under SEO | 29 Comments

After a shaky (and some say, shady) start, GoCompare are now top of [car insurance] on Google. As you can see from the graph below, GoCompare have slowly made it. (Note this data is for the Google.com domain but the trends are similar).

Have they done this using white-hat techniques? Hmmm. Let’s look at a few Google queries. Click to continue

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Oct

31

Insurance Topics That Float Your Boat

Filed Under Miscellaneous | 15 Comments

After nearly a full year’s worth of blogging about insurance and related topics, George and I are interesting in opening the scope a little further. We know we’ve got a substantial SEO crowd checking in with the blog and adding their views, but wouldn’t it be great if we could widen the net slightly. Wouldn’t it Ernest? Yes Ernest, it would children!

So in the interests of fair play (and a desperate need for popularity), what topics vaguely related to each of us working in or on the fringes of the insurance world would you guys like us to delve into, probe, antagonise, uncover, rationalise and whatever else it is we do?

Are you a GUI freak? PPC master? Marketing and advertising expert? Do you get your kicks from technology? Do you bathe in XML and SOAP feeds? Does (dare I say it) web 2.0 hit the spot for you? Whatever happened to web 1.8. Are you interested in cracking open some debates about business models and movements in the various markets?

What do you want people?!

The chances are we will get picked up by MSN or Yahoo under searches for boat insurance anyway so any suggestions for that niche will be discounted!

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Oct

29

MoneySavingExpert DOWN - Nigerian Hackers take revenge

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators | 2 Comments

Moneysavngexpert denial of service Moneysavingexpert has been hacked. The moneysavingexpert.com site has been down for the last few days due to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) . It basically means that a few hackers area little irked and have launched an attack on the ‘consumer terrorist’ site.

Problems started at around 16:00 on the 26th October and have continued throughout the weekend. Things seem to be settling a little but the site is still slow. This has really got to hurt the company’s revenues. And Martin Lewis’ pride.

Wikipedia has already been updated with the info and the blogosphere is awash with claims and counterclaims about a Nigerian scam.

It looks like Prolexic have been brought in to stem the DDoS attack.

UPDATE: They appear to be down again: 4th December 2007

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Oct

19

thriftyscot.co.uk, bikingneeds.com and onlyfinance.com commit the ultimate crime!

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators | 12 Comments

Without sounding like a whining old pensioner …in this day and age, would you go out for the day and leave your front door wide open? Would you leave the car engine running whilst you nipped into the post office on the High Street (without intentions of a quick getaway)? NO! You probably wouldn’t even walk down a dark street on your own anymore.

The online world is no different to the real world. Even the guys in the insurance market (who can create insurance for anything!) have invented an online fraud insurance product. Pants though it may be, it has registered in their minds that not everything is safe online and a risk exists. So why on earth are thriftyscot.co.uk, bikingneeds.com and onlyfinance.com all capturing customers’ personal (very personal) details through an insecure online form? How can they justify doing this? Click to continue

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