Comparethemarket.com has seen a 400% increase in unique visitors year on year, boosted by its Compare The Meerkat campaign

The insurance site has seen monthly unique visitors increase from 218,000 to 1.1m between February 2008 and February 2009, according to Nielsen Online.

The company’s integrated Compare The Meerkat campaign, developed by VCCP, launched in January.

The results come as the overall price-comparison site category experiences significant growth in traffic as the economic climate squeezes consumers’ budgets.

According to Nielsen, unique visits to price-comparison sites were up 32% year on year in February, from 10.9m to 14.4m.

Comparethemarket.com’s growth echoes that of rival sites including Go Compare — up by 177% year on year from 411,000 to 1.14m users — and Moneysupermarket.com — up 20% from 2.3m to 2.8m users.

In a bid to build on the increased activity, Go Compare has appointed Harvest Digital to manage its payper-click search campaigns for MSN and Yahoo, taking over from incumbent Latitude.

Nicholas Hall, head of marketing at Go Compare, said the sector faces a challenging year, despite the growth seen in 2008.

“There’s still massive growth potential for the market as there are plenty of people who don’t renew their insurance each year,” he said. “But there may be some that can’t maintain the growth and may not be around at the end of the year.”

He added, “We need to be even more at the front of people’s minds as the sector becomes more competitive. Our marketing spend will reflect that.”