Ladies and gentlemen….start your engines. These famous words of racing will kick off the Nascar Sprint Cup Series at the 50th running of the Daytona 500 this Sunday at 2pm EST. 168,000 screaming spectators will emerge from Nascar hibernation, which commenced at the Homestead-Miami Speedway last November, to fill the stands of the 2.5 mile tri-oval race track. With Nascar’s growing popularity, Compete used its panel of 2 million people to gauge fan excitement, and answer some burning questions before the 2008 season begins.

We first rev up the engine with the typical unique visitor increase in January; excitement sets in as February nears. The number of unique visitors to Nascar.com increased 25% month-over-month to 2.2 million visitors. However, what’s more surprising is that visitation was down 14% year-over-year. This means Nascar.com needs to floor it to reach last February’s calendar year high of 5.3 million visitors.

Going into Daytona, we next wanted to determine which driver would sit on the pole position based on the number of visitors viewing driver-specific information on Nascar.com. “Boogity Boogity Boogity…let’s go racing”

• As we work our way around the track, we find 7 cars swappin’ paint in 5.5 to 7 thousand visitor turn. Rubbin’ is racing ya’ll, but keep it clean
• Beginning to pull away from the pack at 8 thousand visitors, Kyle Busch is holding steady in the M&M sponsored Toyota
• Just ahead of Busch, the Chevrolets of Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin (sorry Aric, Mark has seniority) are running strong between the 10 to 16 thousand visitor mark
• Behind our leader, we find Jeff Gordon and Kasey Kahne working together to track down Tony Stewart’s Home Depot car who is taking the high line in the 27 thousand visitor turn
• And nearly lapping all of the competitors is our leader and pole position winner is Dale Earnhardt, Jr. with a whopping 64,000 visitors

While Jr. is certainly enjoying his lead how are Nascar sponsors performing before spending $550,000 on a 30-second spot for this Sunday’s race? Let’s take a look at which sponsor websites are naturally attracting more Nascar Enthusiasts today.

Using Compete’s Behavior Match, an online media planning tool, we created a custom segment of Nascar Enthusiasts and gathered all the websites they visited in January 2008. We then scored this segment against the total internet browsing population to determine the top-10 major car sponsor sites (think big stickers) that Nascar Enthusiasts visit more often than the average internet browser. As of January, Kasey Kahne’s Dodge Budweiser sits atop the sponsor leader board – read as Nascar Enthusiasts are 7 times more likely to visit Budweiser.com.

We’ve dropped the green and we know which drivers and sponsors are getting initial traction. But Nascar is a long season and anything can happen - we’ll have to keep an eye out to see who takes the checkered…

I recently decided to play around with Compete’s Behavior Match™ online media planning product tool. I took on the fictional persona of a progressive lending company, Halfpipe & Hairband Lending LLC., which is trying to target the disenfranchised younger generations dealing with the shocking realization that you actually have to pay back student loans and that buying/maintaining a house is expensive. ”Bummer dude!”. For those who are not familiar with Behavior Match™, the idea is to watch all the websites your segment visits for a given month and determine the best places to find them. Below is a quick example of one of the reports generated by Behavior Match™.

The question remains; where will H&H Lending find great advertising opportunities online to reach these Gen-Y and Gen-X credit seekers? We will start with seniority and the findings for Generation-X users (defined as age 28 -40). Here are some great sites where credit seeking prospects are over-indexing:

• One of the highest sites to over-index was an Australian gambling site which allows US citizens the ability to ”legally” bet (unless they actually win big and get caught) called lasseters.com.au. This website over-indexed by 950, which can be read as, Gen-X credit seekers are 9.5x more likely to visit this site than the average web surfer.
• It looks like those drug commercials with their vivid imagery of a life made more beautiful has a big effect on the Gen-X’ers. In July, weight loss drug sites like zoeta.com, encouraged large volumes of web traffic to their home page.
• Possibly one of the largest missed opportunities, and my personal favorite, comes from the website western.goldbucklenetwork.com. This may be the perfect time to reconnect with the old west enthusiast inside all of us because 22.5% of the Gen-X segment will never forget the Alamo.

Alright, enough about the people pushing to be king of the hill; it’s now time to tap into the vigorous youth of Generation Y (defined as ages 18-27):

• From shopping, entertainment, celebrity gossip and social networking, it is not surprising to see a huge over-index for online dating sites. The top domain for September was dateroad.com, and the Gen-Y segment were 15x more likely to visit this website than the average internet surfer.
• Mid-twenties is about the time you realize that all those frivolous charges you jammed on your credit card in college are starting to catch up with you. Many Gen-Y surfers concerned with their credit over-indexed on sites such as requestcredit.com and mycredittoday.com.
• For the Gen-Y guys, it clearly showed that no one is immune to a ”too good to be true” deal on the internet with 16.5% of the segment heading to footballjersey4free.com. Similarly, August marked the highest over-index for victoriassecret.com. Does anyone remember the promotion that month? My copy of the catalog always goes missing… At any rate, there is no doubt that Gen-Y is trying to look good for their internet dates.

There were also some interesting high-level findings to take away from the study.

All the sites mentioned in this blog are within the top 50 over-indexed domains, you really don’t have to look hard to find good sites you may not have heard of or considered.

• Gen-Y credit seekers are more in line with their 20-something syndrome and are spending the bulk of their time online looking for dates, worrying about their credit score and getting fresh new threads (honestly, who shops in person these days?).
• The other big takeaway was some troubling insight into the minds of the Gen-X’ers. When it comes to credit seekers, Gen-X is about three steps away from their midlife crisis. They are visiting sites that cater to the use of gambling, quick fix health pills, 10-gallon hats, home improvements and the desperate need for quick money right now!

From all of us here at Halfpipe and Hairband Lending LLC., we are proud to announce that integrating some of these websites into our marking mix helped Q4 close with the biggest gains for personal lending accounts in the 6-month history of our fictitious company! We would like to wish all Gen-X and Gen-Y credit seekers a speedy getaway from student loans, home improvement projects that don’t result in home destruction and plenty of time to watch old western films in the center console of their brand new Corvette.