Based on a survey of over 1,000 consumers, Aggregation Metrics: Consumer Approaches to Online Insurance Comparison Sites in Canada offers updated 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 use of aggregators on the path to purchase, 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 cell 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 and annual household income but also type of cover held, differentiating between standard and non-standard policies and (for auto insurance only) between telematics-enabled policies and regular policies. In addition, it benchmarks the performance of eight of the leading insurance comparison sites in Canada in terms of awareness and sales conversion rates.
For a number of the metrics in scope, note that the latest data for 2019 is compared with that from the previous equivalent Aggregation Metrics survey carried out in 2016 in order to show their evolution over time.
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 – ClicAssure, InsuranceHotline.com, Kanetix, LowestRates.ca, RateHub.ca, Rates.ca, RateSupermarket.ca and SoumissionAssurance – in order to indicate rates of recognition, use to research insurance and use to actually buy insurance;
- original insights concerning the extent to which Canadian consumers make use of comparison sites for other services such as banking products, home energy and broadband services, and cell phone subscriptions.
For further information about this research, please access the table of contents and series prospectus by clicking on the corresponding links to the left-hand side of this page, or e-mail
[email protected].