Travel Insurance industry report

For the full travel insurance industry report (PDF) click here.

Which New Zealand Travel Insurance providers are maximising their market share online?

Find out which travel insurance providers are taking the lead in organic search and how they’re doing it.

FIRST has investigated the organic search engine rankings for NZ consumer searches focused on travel insurance, utilising FIRST’s Ranking Based Reach (RBR) analysis framework. In addition, a consumer survey was carried out to discover what is most important for Kiwis wishing to apply for an insurance.

In this travel insurance industry report we discovered:

  • Currently, Southern Cross stands out in the search landscape followed by AA, and State capturing a big proportion of the demand thanks to prominent organic and paid search presence.
  • An Insurance Council research of 3000 New Zealanders who travelled overseas last year found 22 per cent of those who went to China and 18 per cent of those who went to Australia had no insurance at all.* Educating travellers on the necessity of being insured abroad should form part of a key customer acquisition strategy.
  • Search results are broadly dispersed among a wide range of competitors, even more so in mobile. In this competitive insurance market, retailers are missing out on what is probably the most cost effective marketing channel by not investing in a robust and smart search strategy.
  • Surprisingly, in our survey we revealed that Kiwis think reputation and credibility is the most important factor when considering travel insurance, followed by a transparent policy and the price. Companies need to continually improve their trustworthiness, especially through online touch points.
  • Nearly 6 out of 10 Kiwis apply online for a travel insurance, which shows the high importance of being visible online and of offering a great user experience.
  • A considered digital strategy that integrates both organic and paid search should be a key customer acquisition and revenue driver for travel insurance providers.
  • Popular search phrases are missing from quite a few sites and in most cases very little is being done with organic search.

FIRST uses its bespoke metric called RBR (Ranking Based Reach) to estimate how well each company is ranking in search engines. RBR provides a simple way to compare a website’s search engine rankings with its competitors. RBR is an estimate of the percentage of available search traffic a website will receive for a set of phrases – this gives the sites share of search or reach. It is weighted based on the popularity of each search phrase and the relative click through rate (CTR) of each ranking position.

For the full report (PDF) please click here