I am pleased to announce that AgentInsider™ delivered its 1,000,000th Internet lead on Saturday, June 9th! This milestone comes at a time when Internet-related advertising revenues in the U.S. surpassed $4.8 billion in the first quarter of 2007 — a 26% year-over-year increase. Fittingly, the demand from both consumers and agents to be introduced to each other via the Internet is stronger than ever, and online lead generation is becoming as common as other traditional forms of insurance advertising (i.e. Yellow Page directories and direct mail).

Using AgentInsider™ to grow your book of business, makes you not only an early adopter of Internet leads, but also makes you an effective Internet advertiser. Having an account allows you to advertise “directly” in AgentInsider™ based on how you target ZIP Codes, and it also enables you to "indirectly” advertise under the guise of InsWeb.com. Converting an online consumer to an AgentInsider lead, however, is certainly no easy task. Any agent that has ever tested online advertising can probably attest to the fact that advertising on the Internet is not ideal for an insurance agent's limited marketing budget. For example, the cost of a click for the search engine phrase "car insurance quote" in Google® or Yahoo!® can range between $16 and $22. It may take half a dozen of those clicks for an agent to actually generate one quotable lead. With that in mind, AgentInsider serves as an agent's local Sherpa in the Internet advertising environment, delivering targeted leads in real-time without the associated costs and risks.

If you've ever wondered where your AgentInsider auto and homeowners leads come from, the simple answer is that they are generated from the millions of consumers that visit www.InsWeb.com each year. But, there is much more to it than that. All of our efforts to drive consumers to shop for insurance at InsWeb are through online marketing and advertising channels. In fact, InsWeb is among the largest direct response advertisers with Yahoo!® and MSN® to name a few. In all likelyhood, you've most likely seen an InsWeb advertisement if you've visited one of these portals. InsWeb also maintains strategic partnerships with several leading automotive sites such as Kelley Blue Book®, Edmunds®, CARFAX®, AUTOBYTEL® and CarMax®. Marketing on search engines such as Google®, Yahoo!® search and MSN® search, provide a steady source of quality leads as well. Targeted email campaigns and advertising networks (companies that run InsWeb ads across hundreds of smaller sites) round out InsWeb's marketing mix for lead acquisition.

All tolled, these efforts compelled over 1.5 million consumers to start one of the InsWeb online quote forms in the first quarter of 2007, at a cost of nearly $5,000,000. These are the same consumers that turn into targeted leads that are available for purchase in your area. So the next time you begin to work an AgentInsider™ lead, remember that this consumer is more than just a lead; it is a consumer that began his/her shopping experience somewhere on the Internet and qualified themselves through one of InsWeb's extensive online quote forms, making them a quality AgentInsider™ lead.