Here, I’m looking mainly at homepages as the majority of users in the study entered brand names of providers or comparison sites.

These may not be dedicated landing pages, but as just 25% of users in the study searched for general terms such as ‘home insurance’, the homepages essentially become the landing pages. 

Confusion over products offered

One common complaint was that users were put off by pages which appeared to focus on other types of insurance. 

Indeed, it does seem that most sites tend to give more attention to car insurance, as in these examples. 

On Aviva and Churchill, the car insurance products are more prominent, though both do provide links to home insurance.

On Churchill, it’s a question of which product the carousel shows when you arrive, though two of four slides are for car insurance. 

Moneysupermarket’s homepage is making an effort to promote its energy comparison service, but it does at least provide clear links to all of its products. 

Users couldn’t immediately find out where to start the quote process

This is pretty important stuff.

You’ve invested in TV and other ads to build brand awareness, you’re shelling out on PPC even for brand searches, so you would think making it easy for customers to get a quote would be top of the list. 

However, it seems that customers weren’t always led straight into the quote process. Here are some examples… 

Direct line has paid Harvey Keitel to reprise his role as The Wolf from Pulp Fiction. This must have been expensive, so the company has plastered him all over the homepage. 

This is all very well, but the net result is that Direct Line seems to expend more effort on the page to encourage people to watch these ads rather then get a quote (there’s also the previous issue of focusing on car insurance). 

It’s about getting customers to retrieve a home insurance quote and this combination of green button and dropdown isn’t the best way to do this: 

Here’s a much better example from GoCompare which deals with both of the issues users highlighted. 

Home and car insurance are given equal prominence. There are no distractions and the calls to action to grab quotes are as clear as you like. 

In summary

Customer acquisition in such a competitive market is a challenge, and can be very expensive. 

Therefore, it is a waste of ad budgets if you don’t do as much as possible to convert customers once they arrive at your site. 

If searchers are coming to an insurance site, they want a quote in most cases. Make it easy for them.