Insurance Blog

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

UK TV Ad Revenue Underwritten by Car Insurance Price Comparison War!

When Insurance Blogger was a nipper.....

Back in the 1960's if you were lucky you had a black and white televison - the box!
with an aerial that looked like a sea mine or something out of Doctor Who sitting on top of it.

There were 2 UK TV Channels:

The BBC - Mother of the Nation and voice of the world......

& ITV - which was a loose consortium of regional independent television companies that broadcast on their own frequency AND network distribution relay.

This meant that every time you changed channel, which was a process of turning a huge dial until you got a fuzzy ghost image - you had to turn the aerial as well to switch to a different signal supplier.

This caused much distress in every UK Household with people arguing over aerial placement whilst trying to watch fuzzy images of man supposedly walking on the Moon.

The Independent Television Companies were funded by advertising revenue for commercials placed in programme 'intermissions' known in the UK as 'Commercial Breaks'. This allowed companies like Granada to fund their own programmes and make 'soaps' like Coronation Street.
Product placement was banned on The BBC and was also severely limited as to the acceptable use of on screen products, within ITV programme drama of the day.

This ban has very recently been lifted and you might soon even see the BBC's Phil Mitchell on Eastenders popping down to his local Post Office TM for some Travel Insurance or visiting a car insurance comparison website for his Jaguar insurance, coming to our screens as desperate TV production companies try to raise additional funding in hard times.

Even the BBC will not remain immune in the face of falling TV viewing figures and the rise of integrated digital services.

Today ITV is still reliant upon revenue sourced from intermission commercials, however with global distribution opportunities for selling programmes abroad they are now able to find sponsors for most popular shows.

According to a recent survey by business intelligence group DataWatch Monitor UK, Insurance adverts account for 52% of the total advertising revenue spend on UK TV commercials and specifically car insurance which accounts for 63% of that.

So Who is spending all this money, millions of pounds that is underwriting some great UK independent TV productions?

Well unless you live under a rock or don't own a screen (Boxes are consigned to pre-history along with the Dodo and the Betamax by the way!), you can't have failed to notice that there is a car insurance price comparison site war going on out there at the moment with the BIG 4 all trying to outdo each other on spend and it's getting dirty..........

So who are the big 4?
Well in no particular order , though Google has one....

Money Supermarket.com
Confused.com
Compare The Market.com
Go Compare.com

So who is winning this war?

Well it's hard to give a definitive answer because campaigns are in a constant state of flux and one month it might be the furry meerkat toy rodent or the next month, the fat opera singer at No.1 in the Sales Charts. It is difficult to COMPARE!

The TV ads always tell the prospect car insurance purchasers to visit their website, so a fairly accurate measure of website usage over time by website name search, can be extracted from Google and here are the results....

WACKY RACES
As you can see, that annoying pompous man from the Dragons Den is leading the way by far at the moment with the furry rodent bringing up the rear. This is likely to change at Christmas when Compare The Market bring out the talkng meerkat. Looks like the fat annoying tenor over there Ad is working!!! For Now!

To see how your website compares to the big boys do your own visitor comparison with your competitiors over at Google Trends for Insurance Price Comparison giants

Labels: advertising, car insurance, compare car insurance, Compare The Market, Confused, Go Compare, insurance comparisons, insurance marketing, MoneySupermarket, price comparison

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Go Compare Elsewhere! Google slaps aggregator

The wires are hot out there this morning and the keyboards buzzing as it appears that Google has slapped, that is, removed from it's search results all mentions of GoCompare.com.
The UK insurance comparison website had featured widely across the top of Googles search results for all sorts of insurance related terms, before yesterday!
Word on the street has it that GoCompare was indulging in very dubious link building practices. Ior those of you who aren't familiar with search engine rankings, the positions that you appear in the results are largely determined by the number of one way links you can build pointing into your website. These links should however, be on theme!
If you carry out a backlink search on Yahoo for Gocompare.com you'll see links from some very strange and dubious blogs, which tends to support this theory.

Google is quite clear in it's webmaster guidlines and elsewhere about purchasing or acquiring links through nefarious practices.
The same thing happened to GoCompare last year but because of the number of links from authority sites the penalty only lasted a short while.

Interestingly, as a response GoCompare.com appears to have upped it's spend with Google adwords in a bid to retain traffic and please the gods.

Perhaps Google should do the same thing and SLAP all the other insurance comparison sites that occupy the first page of Google for car insurance and other keyword terms - they are all at it as well, some of them getting links in much worse ways than poor old gocompare. Just go and compare backlinks from the top five results for car insurance - these companies employ huge teams of people whose job it is simply to build links and buy links.

Labels: Go Compare, GoCompare.com, Google, Internet Marketing