UK Consumer Finance online intelligence report, Dec 2011 – May 2012
What will you get from this report?
- A who’s who in online consumer finance.
- In-depth market analysis covering December 2011 to May 2012.
- Over 100 individual pieces of key insights.
- Over 50 individual pieces of statistical interpretation.
- Analysis of the top 50 brands across the top 100 keywords.
- An interpretation of the top brands search and social media strategies.
- Who are the market leaders?
- Which keywords are driving market visibility?
- What are brands doing to achieve maximum market share?
- How are brands using social media to acquire customers?
- Price-comparison operators dominate both search marketing and social media.
- Moneysupermarket is the only operator that is visible in the top 10 for all the primary keyword product markets.
- Despite the economic downturn following the financial crisis in 2008, recent trend analysis shows a gradual increase in search impression volume for keyword markets such as current accounts, credit cards and loans.
- The pay day loan market which sits outside of the traditional retail banking arena has seen the most dramatic increase in search impression activity.
- As aggregators monopolise the organic index, paid search has become a key channel to market for many of the traditional retail banks including HSBC, NatWest Bank and Barclays Bank.
- Compare The Market is the most innovative operator within social media, making the channel a key element of their online market strategy.
- Very few of the traditional retail banks are utilising social media to develop a two way dialogue that stimulates social integration and engagement.
- What’s the size of opportunity within the consumer finance sector?
- A macro analysis of the consumer finance sector tells us that insurance and loans dominate the search impression volume with a collective 69%.
- The dominance of insurance and loans is underpinned by high search impression volume for keyword markets such as car insurance (22%), pay day loans (21%) and loans with 12%. This stands in contrast to the traditional core consumer finance services market i.e. current accounts and savings, which has a much lower collective search impression volume of only 10%.
- Barclays Bank, HSBC, RBS, NatWest, Lloyds TSB, Halifax Bank and Santander take the lions share covering an impressive 82% of all brand search impression volume.
- Traditional high street banking retailers dominate our brand index with Moneysupermarket being the only non-lending operator who feature in the top ten.
- Moneysupermarket leads the organic rankings for nine out of ten keyword markets including the high volume sub verticals car insurance, loans and mortgages.
- Money Saving Expert has a strong presence within many keyword verticals including loans, car and travel insurance. Their purchase by Moneysupermarket will give the group a massive search impressive coverage across many verticals.
- As part of an aggressive strategy to challenge the dominance of the aggregators Google has launched their own price comparison within the keyword markets credit cards, current account and savings accounts.
- PPC is a key channel to market for many retail banks or direct financial lenders. This is largely down to the fact that price comparison sites dominate the organic index for a large number of keyword verticals.
- Supermarket giants Tesco Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank are providing consumers with a cost effective alternative and feature prominently for the keyword markets loans and car insurance.
- Tesco Bank, along with confused.com, has developed a social strategy that has the most robust balance between engagement quality and volume.
- Operators are primarily using price promotions and customer service content techniques on social media to engage with potential and existing customers.
