In July, we posted a blog about the rising traffic of the finance sections of the major portals (e.g. Yahoo! Finance, MSN MoneyCentral). In the blog, we hypothesized that the increase in online interest for financial research and information is contributing to increased interest by people researching their personal finances online as people are taking a closer tab on their finances these days.

This interest caused me to take a closer look at how several personal finance sites are performing online. Each site, which allows people to aggregate and track all their personal finances, has its own flavor. Three of the most popular sites are:

• Wesabe.com provides a community-like atmosphere where people share tips about personal finance
• Geezeo.com is an ad-driven site with a heavy emphasis on selling credit cards
• Mint.com uses the information you provide to serve up comparisons of your accounts with competing accounts that could save you money

From personal experience tracking my finances is becoming an obsession (of course, never during business hours). Apparently, I’m not the only one obsessing about my dwindling 401k. Mint.com was viewed by more than 480k visitors during August 2008. Since August of 2007, Mint.com has grown in traffic by more than 965%. As the chart below demonstrates, none of Mint.com’s competitors has come close to that kind of traffic or growth.

So why are people visiting Mint.com more than Wesabe.com or Geezeo.com? The reasons are both experiential and strategic:

• Mint.com does not serve up one ad on its website. Got that? Not one ad. Now, you might get a “money-saving” offer like the one in yellow shown below, but those offers are on a separate tab and you can choose to ignore them completely.
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• There is a limited population of consumers who want to do their personal finances as a group activity. I think I’m pretty loose-lipped when talking about money, but I’m not going to “open my kimono” on a website.


• Mint.com has a smart marketing strategy. Mint.com is prominently placed in search listings for keywords like “Quicken” and “personal finance software.” As a result, there is less likelihood that consumers are going to find Geezeo.com or Wesabe.com.

Mint.com recently announced the capability to add your mortgage, student, and auto loans to your portfolio to give users a broader picture of their finances. In this economic climate, this seems to be what people need right now, and it should be interesting to see how Mint.com will continue to expand its capabilities and grow its customer base.

This past week Liberty Mutual said it would buy the Seattle-based insurer Safeco for $6.2 billion, bumping Liberty Mutual up from 6th place to be the 5th largest property and casualty insurer in the US. With the addition of Safeco, Liberty Mutual expands its brand in the western US by adding Safeco’s extensive network of agents.

As always, our question is how will this impact the online business for both Liberty Mutual and Safeco? Liberty Mutual has a strong agent network in the Northeast, but has also worked hard to build its presence online in the past couple of years and has become an important direct insurer. Safeco, by contrast, continues to do business primarily through its agents. It doesn’t take a huge leap to see the opportunity for Liberty Mutual to extend its online brand into Safeco’s footprint.

Looking at both companies over the past 12 months demonstrates Liberty Mutual’s progress in driving traffic to libertymutual.com against the relative stability in homepage visitors to safeco.com. Liberty Mutual’s homepage received over 330,000 unique visitors in March 2008 (up from just over 200,000 in March 2007), while Safeco received a little more than half that with over 170,000 unique visitors in March 2008.

Where these differences meet the bottom line is in wildly different volumes of business generated online. Looking at LibertyMutual and Safeco’s auto insurance business only, Compete data shows Liberty Mutual completing almost 50,000 auto quotes each month. Safeco only completes about 1,000 quotes online each month. If we imagine Liberty Mutual’s business model overlaid with Safeco’s existing online traffic, Safeco could be generating more than 25,000 auto quotes per month online – expanding Liberty Mutual’s overall online quote volume about 50%.

The challenge for Liberty Mutual is in convincing Safeco’s agents of the benefits that come with a more online-centric model while fighting off aggressive competitors in the West like the newly invigorated AIG/21st and GEICO. We’ll be watching closely!

In November of 2007, Bank of America collaborated with Brighter Planet to introduce a “Green” Credit Card. Consumers earn points on the card that helps build community based renewable energy projects. Since the card is environmentally friendly, it makes sense that it would attract the attention of those consumers who are environmentally conscious and in turn show that behavior on the internet. What better way for a bank to reach out to environmentally conscious consumers than by creating a credit card that invests in the environment?

The real question is whether Bank of America has been successful in targeting the environmental consumer with this card. Moreover, if yes, how is Bank of America performing compared to the competition? I decided to use our Search Analytics Select™ tool to find the answer

Looking at the Environmentally Conscious segment, Bank of America sticks out as “Green” consumers have flocked to the site during the same month that Bank of America unveiled their “Green” card. Bank of America’s targeting of Environmentally Conscious consumers through search seems to have paid off in the initial launch of the card as Bank of America received more than 60,000 more environmentally conscious prospects through search referrals to their site, growing 171% from October. While it is clear that the card had an impact on referrals from Environmentally Conscious consumers to Bank of America, it would be great to compare how they fared by search engine. Did Bank of America rely on one search engine? Did they spread out their search marketing across all of them?

Separating the search engines for Bank of America brings up a couple of interesting points. Both Google and MSN saw jumps in total Search Referrals to Bank of America. We can see where those referrals came from as the Environmentally Conscious segment increased their Search referral traffic to Bank of America dramatically from October to November. Google seems to stick out as referrals grew almost 202%, however the largest percentage growth was MSN with 474% growth over the month. Even Yahoo grew in referrals for environmentally conscious consumers while overall Yahoo search referrals declined. This staggering jump in search referrals came from the same month Bank of America released their “Green” card in partnership with Brighter Planet.

What does this mean? Search works. However, it has to be executed effectively in order to reach who is being targeted. Bank of America has been able to harness their search marketing to drive their target segment to their site. This also opens several questions as to the effectiveness of search. Why wasn’t Yahoo as large a jump as the other two search engines? Was it not as effective as the others were? Perhaps this represents an opportunity for rivals to jump in and grab search words because Bank of America overlooked Yahoo