As a self-proclaimed “car guy,” I do a fair amount of automotive research on the Web. A new study from Yahoo and comScore has shown that a lot of other people do the same. It remains somewhat unclear how many are “just looking,” however, and how many are doing actual car shopping.
Yahoo Search marketing’s senior manager of automotive category, David Schwartz, announced the companies’ findings in an “online webinar.” Search Engine Watch captured a number of quotes from the event, beginning with a response to the findings. “We were incredibly surprised at just how large this market is,” Schwartz said.
The study involved thousands of comScore users over the course of three months, “with follow-up interviews with 342 users,” according to Chris Sherman’s article. From this sample, the companies determined that “45% of the U.S. population visited automotive web sites, amounting to 716 million unique visits.”
“Only 6% engaged in actual shopping behavior,” Sherman wrote, but this small group was pretty enthusiastic about it. “These users represented 36% of total visits – 4.6 million customers with over 250 million visits, or more than 50 visits each . . . . More than 77% either bought a car or said they were planning on buying a car within a year.”
People often knew what they were looking for, at least in one sense. “Just 9% of visitors to auto sites used search to find the sites. Direct navigation was far a more common means of reaching a web site,” Sherman reported. In terms of actual car selection, more than a few perceptions were altered.
“40% of those responding said that search reinforced what they already thought, but 60% changed their minds over models or other factors after searching and visiting a number of web sites.” This underlines the importance of research. There’s nothing like finding out that BMW’s iDrive, which is promoted as a useful feature, is actually despised by many reviewers.
So do your car research, folks. It’s fun, it can lead to better buying decisions, and besides – everyone else (or 45% of them, at least) is doing it.
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Doug is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest eBusiness news.
