I’m still gloating about winning my March Madness pool – Rock Chalk Jayhawk! Yes, I was glued to the TV during all games… yet, I can’t remember one single ad that aired. It’s sad for marketers really, if I was in fact who they were trying to reach; a college sports enthusiast! Which got me wondering… How much is typically spent on advertising during March Madness?

TV Ad sales projected by TNS were to be around $545 million. “As a sports marketing event, the collegiate basketball tournament is part of a Final Four alongside the Super Bowl and the Summer and Winter Olympics,” said Jon Swallen, SVP of research at TNS Media Intelligence.

And who are the biggest spenders? Well, apparently General Motors has consistently been the top TV advertiser in the tournament, spending an average of $70 million annually during the past five years. So what did GM get for the money?

Using Compete’s Search Analytics Select we created a segment of people called “college sports enthusiasts”. We found that referrals from search engines (MSN, Yahoo!, Google) to Pontiac.com and Chevrolet.com for this segment did increased significantly in March…

Good. The advertising worked… sort of. Increased traffic to Pontiac and Chevrolet doesn’t necessarily mean that it was worth it for GM to spend all those millions - unless of course the quality of the traffic generated was somehow better than before.

Looking at how involved those college sports enthusiasts were on Pontiac and Chevrolet indicates that visitors to both sites were considered more ‘engaged’ in March. Engagement is defined as: use of one of the following tools - Locate a Dealer, Build Your Own, Request a Quote, or Payment Estimator. That being said, conversion, on both Pontiac and Chevrolet’s sites not only reached 13-month highs in March but also outpaced other manufacturers like Dodge, Ford, and Jeep.

What does all of this mean for GM? Well, it seems like the advertising did a good job of attracting people to these two sites. And the quality of the people visiting the sites was better than usual. All’s good, right? Well, for Pontiac at least.

According to Autodata, Pontiac sales were up 6% in March but Chevrolet sales were down 1%. Chevy’s decline was driven by the truck segment, which is being hurt by high gas prices, so there’s more of a story there, but enough for now….

Toyota is closing on Chevrolet as the top brand in the US automotive market. Can Toyota’s web site be contributing to their success? Based on Compete’s Website Engagement Study, the answer is yes.

A look at traffic shows that Toyota was consistently ahead of Chevrolet in the number of people visiting their site until the October Malibu launch. The heavy marketing push for Malibu drove traffic increases of 30% and more and Chevrolet.com exceeded 2 million unique visitors for three months in a row, until January, when Toyota reversed a downtrend and again surpassed Chevy.

What does this mean?
People visiting the Chevrolet site are 37% less likely to visit one of the four key online shopping tools than the Toyota site visitors.

Why is that important?
Compete data shows that those who purchased a vehicle were twice as likely to use a shopping tool on an OEM site.

What is causing the difference?
In a complex industry like automobiles there are a myriad of forces at work that contribute to the online behavior of consumers researching and shopping for cars. Some of the suspects are: the source of traffic, overall marketing efforts, website construction and navigation, consumer targeting, and of course the brand and product preferences of consumers.