Australia's four major banks are reconfiguring their massive digital advertising budgets away from established news outlets and big search engines such as Google and Yahoo.A ground-breaking data collection project conducted on behalf of the major banks by advertising research company, Standard Media Index, has identified comparison shopping sites such as Canstar.com.au and Mozo.com.au as the fastest growing recipients of industry advertising in the last two years.Jane Schulze, the managing director of SMI's operations in Australia and New Zealand, said spending by the banks on affiliate marketing websites has continued to grow this year after a marked surge in 2016."The biggest area of growth in the digital media for the banks is affiliate marketing - mostly comparison websites - with that sector growing to 14.1 per cent of the banks' digital ad spend in 2016, up from 11.7 per cent in 2015," said Schulze.In the first quarter of 2017 the banks' spending on comparison websites continued to grow while their advertising activity fell across many other digital platforms.The comparison websites and other affiliate marketers accounted for 18.4 per cent of online advertising by the banks in the three months to the end of March.The SMI project is the first comprehensive digital advertising database that gives the major banks insights into how their promotional strategies compare with major rivals.The data is collected by SMI from media agency payment systems across the country.While banks allow only limited data to be made public, the SMI dataset enables each to compare the composition of their spending against aggregates for their three biggest rivals.Two of Australia's leading financial services comparison sites last night refused to quantify the value of the advertising boom to their businesses but confirmed they had been beneficiaries.Canstar group executive Steve Mickenbecker said he was not surprised by the findings of the SMI data."We're seeing growth in digital advertising spend across all product categories," he said."So, the SMI research is consistent with the increasing demand from consumers that we're seeing for comparison sites like ours."Mozo director Kirsty Lamont said banks were gravitating to comparison sites because of the "high intent" customers they were able to attract."Comparison sites have become a key part of the Australian digital advertising landscape by connecting high intent customers directly with the brands who can meet their needs," she said."It's an efficient online marketplace model that benefits consumers and financial providers alike."Lamont said comparison sites were more effective than traditional digital media at delivering high performance advertising that reached truly signed-on consumers.While Canstar and Mozo are garnering larger licks of the banks' advertising cash, the big losers in recent years have been popular search engines.Google, Yahoo and Bing accounted for 20 per cent of the digital advertising spend by banks in the March quarter. That represents a sharp fall from the 27.4 per cent share they enjoyed in the same period last year.Traditional news content sites owned by Fairfax and News Corporation still attract the largest advertising spends by banks, but both organisations' shares have declined markedly in the