Industry News & Trends

45% of the U.S. population visits an automotive website

Jeff Kershner
Posted onJul 28, 2006 at 4:16 PM
Updated onUpdated on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:13 PM

An interesting new study from Yahoo and comScore. The study looks at searcher behavior in the automotive segment.

Over a 3 month period, they were able to determine that 45% of the U.S. population visits an automotive website. This amounts to 716 million unique visits.

"We were incredibly surprised at just how large this market is"

The study goes on to talk about the “three types” of automotive websites and how these companies conflict with each other in the search engines (like how I have a huge conflict with automotive.com and dealix’s dealernet.com websites, shadowing what I consider to be my territory in the natural listings in the search engines).

It also shows that most users are visiting the OEM websites more than the second tier aggregators.” This is why I think that it’s becoming increasingly more important for the Manufacturers to design their websites even more towards converting the customer into a lead.

The study also noted ”Despite the large numbers of users visiting automotive web sites, 6% engaged in actual shopping behavior.”


Follow this link to the article
(if this link does not work use the one below)


Click here to read the article in PDF

Jeff Kershner
Founder of DealerRefresh - 20+ Years of dealership Sales, Management, Training, Marketing and Leadership.
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    P Carlton Knoll
  • July 29, 2006
Jeff, great link and info, thank you... as always, you have the best blog on the Internet for this subject matter.

Do you know the site inventory.overture.com? You might want to go there and type in "Hagerstown Maryland". When you do, you will get a list of all search terms duing the month of June, 2006, that included those two words. Overture is owned by Yahoo so the results you see only represent that one engine. Yahoo has 28% of the search market so if you take the raw Yahoo numbers and divide by .28, you get the implied total number of searches during June, 2006.

A few things might interest you on this, Jeff. One, in your market, 32.2% of all searches during June that included "Hagerstown Maryland" were for vehicle purchase type of information (or, so one assumes from the numbers); two, of the top ten searches with those keywords, seven were vehicle purchasing type inquiries; and, three, if one limits the share of market to the top ten, 72.9% of the searches were for vehicle related inquiries. I have emailed you a very informal Excel spreadsheet on this.

Again, great job Jeff and I continue to read your blog daily.

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