Erin Esurance, the animated
auto insurance vixen

Consumers requested 32.4 million auto insurance quotes online in 2007, 8.9 million of which were referred from search engines.

This represents a 36 percent increase in search-referred quotes from the previous year, according to a study by comScore's Marketer service, MarketingCharts reports.

The study analyzed the productivity of search-generated leads, the efficacy of various search marketing techniques, and the actions consumers take after seeing an ad.

More findings from the study:

• Among all types of search, clicks on paid links from generic search terms are most likely to result in a completed quote request:

• 33 percent of search-referred visits from generic paid search result in a completed quote request, compared with 22 percent of generic organic search and 19 percent of branded paid search.
• After seeing an ad for auto insurance, consumers will often use search to find more information about a company (22 percent would do so - an eight-point increase from 2007). A larger group (26 percent) would visit the website specified in the advertisement:

Note: The full copy of the report will be available when released on April 28 in conjunction with the 2008 Auto Insurance Report National Conference.