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…

Boston, MA. February 1, 2008 – Compete’s automotive service experts help OEMs better understand how consumers interact with their websites. In the latest edition of the Compete Automotive Website Engagement Study, a monthly study that analyzes what percent of OEM website visitors use shopping tools, the team assessed the change in visitor use of three shopping tools following BMW’s mid December website redesign.

Build Your Own Vehicle

• The site now features two links to build your own vehicle
• BMW kept the traditional start/stop button in the bottom left of the screen, and added a new link in the top left corner, an area that commonly attracts visitor attention
• 26.9% of the visitors to BMW’s website used the build your own vehicle tool in December
• This represented a 5.1 ppts increase from November

Offers

• The addition of a prominently displayed link to the offers page increased visitor traffic from 5.7% of total site traffic to 9.3%
• The new link is displayed as part of a sliding menu bar in the bottom right hand corner of the homepage

Locate Dealer

• Redesigning the locate dealer tool from a simple zip code entry text box at the bottom right of the home page to the site menu bar led to a 4.3ppts decline in visitor usage
• 7% of visitors used the tool in December compared to 11.3% in November

Compete’s automotive experts help the automotive industries better undertand the shopping behaviors of the US automotive market. One of the ways they do this is through measuring the total number of consumers looking at vehile groups, brands, or even specific car models. The chart below shows the most shopped autos in August 2007, the total number of shoppers per vehicle , and the change from the previous month and year.

Shopper counts are defined as the total demand for a vehicle as measured by the number of unique shoppers at 3rd-party automotive buying sites.

Every year 189 cyclists don spandex shorts and bike jerseys that have as may sponsorships as a Nextel Cup car to fight it out and complete their dream finishing in Paris with the yellow jersey. That’s right, it’s July and Le Tour will be monopolizing the Cable TV station Versus (formerly OLN) with the constant replays of each day’s events in France. For avid cyclists and cycling fans this is a treat – their big event of the year without even having to find the TiVO remote.

Versus is not the only place cycling fans can find up to date information on Le Tour’s news. There are a handful of cycling websites that post news, pictures and videos which cycling enthusiasts flock to during July. This year the tour will have a YouTube site, YouTube Le Tour, devoted to posting videos detailing the action from the field. With all of these options, our curiosity needed to be answered. Do the major cycling sites see an increase in visitors during July?

At first thought you might think cyclists would be out hitting the trails, climbing a large mountain or dodging their way through cars during the summer months. While all of these could be true, there is no doubt that more of them are also checking out the daily Le Tour results via the web. Traffic for all of the cycling news websites, including Versus, see at least 50% more visitors in July compared to other months.

Our curiosity didn’t stop there. We also wanted to see if any of the bike manufactures were possibly able to capitalize on this heightened cycling attention. Using Velocity, a metric measuring the relative change in daily attention, we found that both Trekbikes.com and Schwinnbike.com capture more attention in early July which eventually tapers off towards the beginning of August. Some of this increased attention is probably driven by seasonality trends, but it would be hard to rule out Le Tour’s effect…hopefully Trek and Schwinn are paying attention too.

It is no surprise that a look at the top-10 vehicles consumers shopped in May were dominated by vehicles offering hybrids or better fuel efficiency when you consider gas prices reached an all-time high of $3.19/gallon in May. Out of the top-10 vehicles shopped, six of them offer hybrid models.

If May shopper data tells us anything, it appears that consumers shopping hybrid models strongly relates to gas prices. This led me to the question; Is there a particular price that pushes consumers over the edge? Comparing gas prices to shopper counts of vehicles that offer hybrids, it looks like the magic number is any price greater than $3.00/gallon.

Last July, gas prices reached a 2006 peak of $3.03/gallon and this May gas prices climbed to an all-time high of $3.19/gallon. We found that the largest month-over-month increase in shopper counts among the six vehicles that offer hybrid models also occured in (you guessed it) the same months, July 2006 and May 2007.

Outside of people shopping, is there anywhere else we can look to see if consumers are paying more attention to gas prices once they hit $3.00/gallon? During 2007, the last time the national average was below $3.00/gallon was the week beginning April 23rd. Starting on April 16th we find that velocity, a metric used to analyze the relative growth of a domain over a particular timeframe, for both GasBuddy.com and the US Department of Energy’s website, FuelEconomy.gov, increased substantially. The growth for both of the sites follows the same trend as gas prices did over the period; velocity peaked on May 25th concurrent with gas prices peaking at $3.26/gallon the same week. Interestingly, at its peak GasBuddy.com’s velocity was five times that of FuelEconomy.gov. This would lead me to believe that consumers are probably looking to first locate the cheapest gas in town, and then, when they realize that cheap is a relative term, look for a fuel efficient vehicle!

The internet has not only revolutionized communication, but how we drive as well. Gone are the days of driving while feeling around the back seat for the Atlas to find Missoula, Montana located on page 100. Learning to fold a map to its original shape is a lost art. Few continue to use conventional maps for directions; most now use the web. But where, specifically, are people finding directions?

The Chart below shows Monthly Unique Visitors to the five largest map services sites over the past year. At a macro level, map services follow a seasonal trend: more travel in summer means more traffic to map services.

• Though traffic is down more than 20% from it’s peak in June, MapQuest remains the king of online map services with over twice the traffic of it’s nearest competitor.
• Google Map’s functionality has allowed it to nearly double in size since January 2006. Google’s service is quickly gaining ground on Yahoo’s similar offering, and also shirking seasonal trends.
• Live Search* has been gaining significant traction: coming out of beta in September, it has since grown to twice the size of well established RandMcNally.
• RandMcNally may have led the digital mapping charge with TripMaker in 1994, but it has failed to convert this brand awareness into site traffic; it currently attracts about 1% of visitors to this space.

Map services provide similar offerings, but the way people interact with these services differs significantly. The chart below shows the percentage of total site visitors who queried either a map, or directions.

• Google Map’s visitors are heavily skewed towards map queries. This is most likely due to the service’s option to display both maps and high resolution satellite images. Additionally the “link to this page” feature takes the guess work out of pathing people to specific maps from other websites. Of these four competitors, Google is the only service to offer both of these features.
• The ease of transitioning between maps and directions at both Yahoo and MapQuest’s offerings is encouraging people to do both. At these two services percentage of visitors performing either type of query is above 50%, indicating overlap in the two types of queries (at least one in a month).
• At the opposite end of the spectrum, RandMcNally.com appears to be attracting primarily travelers, as it skews heavily towards queries for directions.

To me, maps feed the adrenaline of adventure and offer excitement of the unknown; the excitement is always greatest at the beginning of a road trip that ends somewhere I have not seen. This feeling isn’t lost on digital maps…as long as you don’t switch to a satellite view.

*Does not include traffic to previous MSN map offerings