Published by Ryan Whitacker on April 26, 2016
Compared to the most objective data available, most car insurance sites are misleading customers and selling you bad or overpriced car insurance.
This post started as a simple question: who has the best car insurance product? Insurance is hard to compare and hard to sell, so we’d hoped to find some data on the product, analyze it, and solve the question in an objective manner for our customers. We did find some objective data, but were surprised to see that the companies we’d call worst were often sold on affiliate sites as the best.
Quick links
What is an Affiliate?
Objective Ranking Data vs. Affiliate Rankings
Affiliate #1: TheSimpleDollar.com
Affiliate #2: The Top Tens
Affiliate #3: Consumer Affairs
Affiliate #4: Insure.com
Google Page 1 Summary
Who’s Really the Best?
How Do I Avoid Being Tricked by Affiliates?
What is an Affiliate?
Car insurance affiliates, in this context, are websites paid to send users to larger insurance companies. Most car insurance companies pay per sale. A Geico affiliate, for example, would drive qualified traffic to geico.com. If someone buys through that link, Geico would pay the website a portion of the profits from the sale.
In the online marketing community, “affiliate” is a dirty word. Affiliates are known for spam, manipulative sales practices, and pushing or ignoring the FTC’s rules. The most-often violated rule relates to paid endorsements. Unless the relationship between affiliate and seller is obvious to the audience, there should be a disclosure of the paid relationship. (You can read more about endorsements here.)
In car insurance those disclosures are rare, even though the vast majority of links and reviews are paid. If there are disclosures, they’re usually found in tiny font in a corner of the page. In other words, the audience usually doesn’t know that reviews, ratings, and comparisons could be influenced by payment. But are affiliates biased by their payout amounts? To answer that question we looked at objective ratings and compared them to the more… subjective ratings from top publishers and affiliates.
Objective Ranking Data vs. Affiliate Rankings
Here is a composite ranking from JD Power and Consumer Reports for some of the largest insurance companies. The two studies are similar, but not identical in ratings. That’s because JD Power focuses on what happens to those who have actually had to use their insurance, and Consumer Reports places more emphasis on customer satisfaction of all customers, including monthly price satisfaction.
Insurance company
Composite Ranking
(Lower is better)
USAA
1.5
Nationwide
9.5
The Hartford
9.5
Geico
12.5
Travelers
13
Progressive
13.5
State Farm
14
American Family
15
Liberty Mutual
15.5
Farmers
19
Allstate
20.5
Esurance
25
Let’s compare these surveys to the first page in Google for “best car insurance company.”
Affiliate #1: TheSimpleDollar.com
In their own words, “The Simple Dollar began as a site for people who are fighting debt and bad spending habits.” That’s ironic because Simple Dollar includes this little statement on most pages:
Was that hard to read? Let’s look closer:
“Advertiser Disclosure: Many offers that appear on TheSimpleDollar are from companies from which the site receives compensation. Compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). This site does not review all companies or include all available credit card offers.” (Emphasis added)
In other words, The Simple Dollar might be selling State Farm because they pay the right amount. It’s hard to imagine what other basis the site has for calling State Farm – which appeared 9th for Consumer Reports and 19th for JD Power – the best insurance company. And if you read through the article you won’t find a basis for that claim. There are small gems like this:
“.. Customers give State Farm consistently high marks for their handling of claims …”
According to what source? Your guess is as good as mine. This affiliate is happy to take the simple dollars from your wallet, sell you mediocre service, and take a cut of your losses.
Affiliate #2: The Top Tens
This one is notable because they’re actually just ignoring and breaking the law by failing to disclose their bias.
Liberty Mutual was ranked 19th by Consumer Reports and 12th by JD Power. It’s simply not the best vehicle insurance company: premiums are quite high, and satisfaction is low in all areas surveyed. Clicking on the “Free Quote” link sends users to a Liberty Mutual landing page with a Commission Junction tracking ID in the URL. We can prove that this is a paid link, but the average customer will have no idea.
Result #2 is esurance, and #3 is Allstate, the worst and second-worst insurance companies as rated by JD Power and Consumer Reports. Aside from terrible ratings, these “best” insurance companies have something else in common: they are easy to monetize through Comission Junction, one of the largest online affiliate networks.
The Top Tens doesn’t even bother to justify its rankings. This is affiliate marketing at its worst – purely imaginary rankings sorted by the profit the site owner makes, spiced with meaningless filler text for Googlebot to consume.
Affiliate #3: Consumer Affairs
Consumer Affairs has a definite sound of authority. It’s no mistake that it sounds like the far-more-reputable Consumer Reports or Department of Consumer Affairs.
At least they’re more upfront about it. Here’s the trick, though. Compensation might not impact ratings or reviews – but it sure does seem to impact which companies are put on the list and what order they appear in.
Affiliate #4: Insure.com
Insure.com has a pretty clever way of selling the brands it gets the most money from while still providing real info:
Notice that Progressive has lower scores than USAA across the board. The big blue square might make some people think it’s the best – but it’s really just a way of highlighting the brand they want you to buy. But at least the columns are sortable, which allows you to quickly see that progressive is not, in fact, the best. In any category. And yes, once again we see the small-text disclaimer at the very end of the page. This one is hard to find even when you’re looking for it. Our brains want to filter this as meaningless legal text.
“Disclaimer: The insurance products on Insure.com are from companies from which QuinStreet may receive compensation. Compensation may impact where products appear on Insure.com (including the order in which they appear). QuinStreet does not include all insurance companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.” (Emphasis added)
Here’s the frustrating thing: these tiny disclaimers technically satisfy the law of disclosing the pay-to-play nature of the relationship. These laws were intended to protect consumers from biased reviews by giving them more information – but is that really what we’re accomplishing with barely-legible disclaimers on the bottom of the page? My guess is that most customers still don’t understand that they’re being shown results in a very biased order.
Regardless, it’s pretty obvious Progressive is nothing more than the high bidder for Insure.com. By the way, “Financial Strength Rating” appears to be from the BBB, and it’s a mostly-meaningless stat for customers.
More of the Same
I could walk through each of these, but you get the idea. Here’s a summary of Google’s page one for “best car insurance companies”:
The Simple Dollar: Tiny footer disclaimer admits they’re manipulating results based on profit.
The Top Tens: Violating FTC guidelines, and very obviously and heavily biased.
Consumer Affairs: Header disclaimer leaves out the fact that they’re adjusting order and which companies are shown for profit.
Insure.com: Can exclude companies that don’t pay them, and default sorts based on profit.
Nerd Wallet: Popular, but also biased and disclosing compensation. Esurance (which would not show up in any “objective analysis,” as Nerd Wallet puts it) is listed.
Consumer Reports: An actually trustworthy site, but all meaningful info is behind the subscription paywall.
Same as above
Clark Howard: Really just an incomplete summary of Consumer Reports data.
Reviews.com: Very small font disclosure similar to The Simple Dollar, stating that they can order providers by profit and exclude those who don’t pay to appear on their site.
Property Casualty 360: A summary of Insure.com’s study. The study does appear to be mostly legitimate, though there’s some worrying language around who was included in the study. The fact that full study itself is not provided should make us skeptical.
It’s disappointing that no one would be able to find objective information on the first page of Google short of paying Consumer Reports for a subscription. Every comparison site on the first page (and almost all on other pages) are manipulating results to improve their bottom line, and the customer suffers. Most comparison queries in Google result in these or similar affiliates, none of which are being honest.
Who’s Really the Best?
That’s easy. Our earlier composite ranking left off some of the smaller car insurance providers:
Company
Consumer Reports Rank
JD Power Rank
USAA
1
2
Amica Mutual
2
3
NJM Insurance Group
3
1
Nationwide is probably the best large provider for non-military families with a 14/5 ranking. Unfortunately we cannot publish a full list of rankings without infringing on Consumer Reports copyright.
How Do I Avoid Being Tricked by Affiliates?
There are a few ways to tell, but no method is fool-proof. It’s best to assume most comparison sites are out to make money off your clicks.
Do a “find on page” for pay, paid, compensation, and compensated. This might lead you to a disclaimer that reveals bias.
Use a site search operator to find the advertiser policy. For example, “site:valuepenguin.com advertising disclaimer compensated”
Watch for URL parameters that indicate tracking links.
The CID and campaign codes are dead giveaways.
For products, Amazon affiliate links are quite common, but Amazon URLs already have lots of parameters. The &tag= or ?tag= in a linked URL indicates an affiliate link.
In Case You’re Wondering
No DecisonData links are currently monetized. This and all other analyses are objective, and we have not received any money for this article (or for anything else).