Insurance Tops Online Spending

Personal Insurance including Income Protection Insurance and Life Insurance are topping dollars spent on Google adwords in Australia according to a recent report by software producer’s wordstream who analyse paid search traffic.

Incredibly insurance makes up about 25 per cent of Google’s revenue according to the report. This is followed by loans related sites such as home loans, personal loans and commercial loans. It stands to reason that these industries produce the most revenue for Google as customer values in insurance and home loans are extremely high relative to other industries. Webmasters will presumably only bid on adwords up to a point where the cost is just below the marginal cost of sales so customer value dictates Google’s return in that respect.

One area where Google continues to miss out is the gambling sector, where user values are high but various regulations around the world limit the extent to which Google can accept advertising. As gambling becomes more regulated in the future, then it is expected that this stream of income for Google will increase. We have already seen evidence of this in the UK and other regions in Europe where gambling advertisements are now accepted.

The cost of adwords for advertisers also remains high due to the significant amount of click fraud which occurs which is nearly impossible for Google to police. Most of this comes from competitors clicking on terms to try to increase the cost of bidding.