In-Market Shopping Trends
Traffic and Sales Trends
How soon will the market bounce back? This is a question that is consuming many of our thoughts over recent months. Numerous predictions have been made that we’ll start to see an up-swing in our economy in 6 months, 12 months, 2 years or even longer. We base this information on historical economic trends and recent consumer studies and surveys, but really, for many businesses it’s difficult to forecast the next month or quarter, let alone a full year out with the amount of unknown variables we are facing in our economy.
Throughout 2008, automotive shopping and researching online mimicked industry sales volume, meaning when shopping went up, sales also went up, and when gas prices crippled the auto industry, the same effects were felt in shopping activity on automotive websites. Already early into 2009, we realize that this will be a different year. Despite the plummeting sales in the auto industry, we’ve sustained our site audience of automotive shoppers and have even grown by 21% in Unique Users from February, 2008.
Table 1.1 Jumpstart Audience Trends, February 2008-February 2009
Looking at our site traffic compared to vehicle sales, we see the trend lines diverge in January and February 2009 in Table 1.2 below. Shopping activity online is holding strong while sales have dropped dramatically.
Table 1.2 Jumpstart Audience Compared to Industry Sales, February 2008-February 2009
Share of Shopping Data
If researching online is still recognizing growth in consumers, will that pay off in sales further out than it did in the past? We believe that the length of time consumers are researching is increasing to nearly 5-6 months prior to when they’re actually ready to purchase, which could mean that sales could start to increase by late summer.
Assuming that’s the case, we would anticipate similar segment trends as in 2008, where cars will outsell trucks and SUVs. We’ve examined our vehicle segments from January and February 2009 to see that Sedans are the leading vehicles being research on our sites, holding 27% of our audience in February (See Table 2.1 below). Similarly to 2008, the SUV and Compact segments followed Sedan in January and February 2009 as some of the most researched vehicles across our sites.
Table 2.1 Share of Jumpstart Audience by Vehicle Segment, January-February 2009
Looking further back to see how the segments have recovered since the fourth quarter of 2008, we see in Table 2.2 below that quite a few of the vehicle segments are recognizing slow and steady increases in consumers shopping for those vehicle types. Among those that suffered from high gas prices are SUVs, Trucks and Sports cars, which are all slowly winning back the attention of in-market shoppers.
Table 2.2 Share of Shoppers by Vehicle Segment, October 2008-February 2009
Lead Submissions on Jumpstart Sites
Another indicator of industry trends is lead submission data on third party automotive websites. February data pointed strongly to the strengthening of the SUV and Compact segments, with Honda continuing as the run-away leader in leads submitted. Table 3.1 shows the share of leads by the top ten models across our sites, comprising mostly of the two segments mentioned.
Table 3.1 Model Leads Submitted on Jumpstart Sites, February 2009
Small SUVs and compact cars dominate the top models of interest, all of which are more practical and economical vehicles, painting a picture of the state of mind of consumers today. Despite the traffic and sales correlation no longer holding its consistency as it did in 2008, we are confident that a delayed effect will be recognized in coming months, and are hopeful of seeing signs of recovery in the auto industry later in the year.
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