Insurance turnover up 6% at Moneysupermarket.com

Aggregator Moneysupermarket.com received 35 million visits by consumers looking for insurance quotes last year, up 8% on 2012.

Turnover from its insurance business increased by 6% to £127.7m, and contributed 57% to the group’s £225m total sales.

But despite the rise in traffic, the number of transactions fell by 5% to 15.6 million.

The results translated into £7.11 per transaction, up from £6.45 last year.

Chief executive Peter Plumb said MoneySuperMarket.com would double its capital investment this year to bring “market leading services in travel and insurance to customers’ mobiles and desktops.”

Turnover in the second half slowed down because changes to Google’s natural search algorithms penalised MoneySupermarket in June. “The Group lost some of its leading positions for some of the key search terms in motor and home insurance. This reduced visitors from natural search and consequently revenues from home and motor insurance,” the company said in a statement.

“The Group made progress during the second half of the year working to regain its natural search positions culminating in the lifting of the penalty in March 2014. The group is now in a good position to improve its natural search positions during 2014.”

The group made a £34.7m profit after tax, but did not release the contribution of different divisions to the total.