.brands Spotlight: Insurance industry

The .brands Spotlight series takes a deep-dive into interesting facets of the .brands space, looking at Stats Hub data to find insights about how .brands are being used across different industries, regions and organizations. This Spotlight piece focuses in on the global insurance industry.

Summary

The insurance industry is the largest sector in the .brands space in terms of total domains registered. This is perhaps more impressive when considering it includes just 34 TLDs – ranking it fifth in this regard behind the information technology, banking & finance, telecommunications and automotive industries. While average usage is very high, this is influenced heavily by just a handful of brands that make up the large majority of activity within the sector.

Key statistics

Total TLDs delegated: 42

Including TLDs from

AXA        STATEFARM        ALLSTATE       MMA       PRUDENTIAL

Key use cases

Industry spotlight: MMA displays a clear strategy

While there are over 2,000 .brand domains registered in the insurance industry, 95% of these are contained in just five TLDs – and lead heavily by French-headquartered company MMA (MMA IARD SA).

Over the last year or so, MMA has registered 1,759 domains in its .mma TLD, 97% of which are active. The vast majority of these are redirects, set up as part of an extensive strategy using locations and regions to direct visitors to local broker information. For example, the domain antibes.mma displays contact details and product information for Antibes, a region in southern France.

This is a clever way for MMA to implement its .brand TLD and use it to create more localized experience for customers, in a similar strategy to that used by Audi.

Redirects, redirects, redirects

Though by far the dominant player in its sector, the MMA model of registering a large volume of domains and setting them up to redirect to existing content is illustrative of the industry as a whole. In fact, of the insurance industry’s 2,185 registered domains, 92% are redirects. Behind MMA in terms of registered domains is Esurance Insurance Company’s .esurance, which has only one non-resolving and 145 redirecting domains. Similarly, Prudential Financial Inc.’s .pru and .prudential TLDs have a combined 142 redirecting domains out of 144 total; and all 20 .allstate domains redirect to existing locations on Allstate’s website.

Where MMA’s redirect strategy is based largely on geographic locations, other companies like Allstate and Esurance have opted to set up redirecting domains based on product and service offerings, such as auto.allstate, claims.allstate and homeowners.esurance, marrying relevant, deep content to insightful, short URLs.

Conclusion

As a highly complex industry with a wide range of detailed products and services, insurance companies by their nature tend to have large multifaceted websites that would otherwise be very difficult to navigate and would force customers to rely on third parties like search to find the information they need. The current usage of .brand domains within the insurance sector shows a clear trend towards redirect strategies.

This approach can provide memorable, meaningful pathways to deeper website content that improves the customer experience and also reinforces the brand in the link. With one of the highest rate of domain usage than any other industry (94% vs industry average of 67%), the insurance sector – and a few key players in particular – is leading the way in this regard.

GoDaddy acquired Neustar's registry business as of August 3, 2020.