I'm Confused dot com about Go dot Compare

I’ve needed to get this off my chest for a few weeks now since I saw the new Go Compare TV advert…

As most of you know, I spent over 10 years working as a senior marketing manager for Confused.com so I have a pretty good understanding of the price comparison market.

I know that:

• The big 4 price comparison sites combined get something like 4 times the amount of monthly searches for their brand names as the keyword ‘car insurance’ - they really have changed the online car insurance market and dominate searches
• Unprompted brand recall is key? - Confused.com CMO Samuel Day talks openly about this (e.g. in this econsultancy article)
• So a high SoV; plus strong brand association should correlate with strong sales and market share
• Despite the millions of pounds spent crafting and advertising these brands, consumers still confuse (!) them. When I worked at Confused.com, our customer support team would get emails asking where their free meerkat toy was. Even now, some friends and family think I worked at Go Compare not Confused.com.
• This brand confusion is exacerbated by the fact that in this industry, competitor brand bidding in PPC is big business. You might have been intending to visit Confused.com but easily end up on Compare the Market and before you know it you've switched your insurance - the 'products' are relatively vanilla so branding is key

So with all that evidence that strong branding is vital, why oh why have Go Compare relaunched?!

Their new TV ad launches ‘Go Dot Compare’....

Their press release implies that consumers can cut out the middleman (Google?) by going straight to go.compare in their browser.

I like their thinking, wouldn’t it be GREAT if all consumers went straight to your website instead of having to click on a Google ad? Unfortunately changing this type of behaviour takes time, and the status quo is that millions of people search in Google every month for something car insurance-related.

When you do visit go.compare - it redirects to the old gocompare.com URL anyway which seems a bit strange but probably a very good thing as they’d lose quite a bit of SEO value by redirecting everything to go.compare.

One Twitter user flagged that if you visit go.compare.com which is a relatively pragmatic URL to type in, you get a 'this site can't be reached' message, they've missed a little trick there.

According to competitor benchmarking tool SEM Rush, they’ve lost some SEO traffic since they launched this new ad. Co-incidence? Or are their SEO team saying ‘we told you so’ because why would you ever change such a good thing - when you have 673,000 people a month (Google keyword planner) searching for ‘Go Compare’ why try to change that behaviour? They still seem to be riding high in the top spot for ‘car insurance’ but I’d be a bit nervous.

So what do you think?

• Did Gio’s jingles become so annoying that it was starting to damage the brand preference/consideration?
• Are they being innovative by moving to a dot compare domain - will others follow?
• Maybe they wanted to steal some of Confused dot com's traffic by jumping on the 'dot' bandwagon? (Thanks Andy Crisp for that inspo!)
• Will they see a drop in Search traffic but higher proportion of direct traffic?
• Will it make any difference to consumers, who will still call it Go Compare?
• Let's see what Twitter says....

They're going pretty hard on the ‘dot’ element - the TV advert features lots of ‘dots’ and I believe the new character is called ‘Dot’.

Surely during a Cost of Living Crisis, your consumer insights would be urging you to go hard on the ‘compare’ angle not ‘dot’?

I’m always one for keeping things simple, maybe something was broken that they needed to fix but I’m not sure this was the right way to fix it.?

Looking forward to getting proven wrong.