In a dark and dreary automotive market, Hyundai found a bright spot in January. Hyundai sales stepped on the accelerator and increased 14% year-over-year to 24,512 units. This sales improvement resulted in a staggering 1.6ppts increase in market share. Given total market sales were down 37% year-over-year and consumers are having a harder time getting approved for credit, Hyundai’s performance was remarkable. This kind of performance begs the question, how did Hyundai drive more sales during these turbulent economic times? One way might be through a unique marketing program Hyundai launched in January.

Hyundai launched a creative and aggressive incentive program at the beginning of January with a great deal of ad support behind it. Through the campaign, Hyundai vehicle buyers can return a vehicle they buy without paying the remaining monthly payments and without jeopardizing their personal credit rating if they lose their income within the next year. In support of the Hyundai Assurance program, Hyundai launched several ad messages with an economic undertone like, “An automaker that’s got your back. Isn’t that a nice change?” The messaging targeted the fact that unemployment continued to rise and consumer confidence continued to fall. The combination of ad support and the deal itself was designed to drive both interest and convert that interest into buyers.

To assess the impact in online behavior of the campaign, Compete quantified the number of people and analyzed the most popular site categories where people were exposed to Hyundai Assurance by aggregating people or sessions who visited any website with the words Hyundai and Assurance in its URL. We found that at least 470,000 unique Americans were exposed to Hyundai Assurance through nearly 500,000 sessions during the month of January.

A vast majority of those sessions fell into one of five categories. Using the top five categories as a base, we see:

• 64% of sessions were viewed on World News websites
• 20% of sessions were ad click-through sessions through Ad Networks and Servers
• 9% of sessions were viewed on Automotive Enthusiast web sites
• And Unclassified/Search represented a combined 7% of sessions

The categories are worth noting because they do not necessarily represent where Hyundai advertised –online or offline—but instead represent one look at where the net impact of that behavior was seen online. For example, Hyundai may have advertised on automotive related websites, but the majority of behavior was seen on world news sites.

Automakers use this type of diagnostic to quickly gauge how their attempts to influence the market are realized in actual online behavior by consumers. Automakers further use this intelligence to:

• Refine ad placement and ad frequency (for example, to what extent was Hyundai ad spend matched to actual consumer behavior?)
• Document the extent to which the 470,000 consumers noted above actually reached a Hyundai website or researched a Hyundai on a third-party automotive website
• Survey exposed visitors to determine what share of them actually purchased a Hyundai vehicle or at least entered the market as a result of the campaign

Hyundai has continued building its awareness among consumers through continued ad support in early February. With strong January sales and continued ad support in February, it will be interesting to see how long Hyundai can continue to ride this early 2009 wave of success.

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!