In March, Progressive and the X PRIZE Foundation announced that Progressive is the corporate sponsor for the Automotive X PRIZE (now known as the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE). The Automotive X PRIZE offers $10M to the team that can win a cross-country race in a vehicle with limited emissions while achieving at least 100mpg. It sounds like Progressive is funding the $10M prize, although it’s unclear whether that is the extent of their investment.

While the X PRIZE is certainly a noble pursuit, will it help Progressive’s shareholders? One stock blogger sees the X PRIZE as a move to keep people driving in an era of expensive oil. It could also be viewed as an opportunity to capture the imaginations of environmentally-conscious “green” consumers.

Looking at the past year, Progressive.com traffic is above its 12-month average, but has been flat in the period since the X PRIZE sponsorship was announced. Referrals to Progressive.com based on X PRIZE related searches have been minimal. I could only find one X PRIZE related search term driving measurable traffic to the site – and it was ranked 139 among all search terms referring traffic to Progressive.com.

In fact, 54% of the traffic related to X PRIZE searches go to either XPRIZE.org or Wikipedia (below are the top 5 destinations for the term).

1. xprize.org
2. wikipedia.org
3. thetruthaboutcars.com
4. progressiveautoxprize.org
5. googlelunarxprize.org

More importantly, from February 2008 to March 2008, Compete data indicates a drop-off in prospect traffic of 17%. Combine flat traffic with a decline in prospects and my conclusion would be that Progressive is seeing an overall decline in serious auto insurance shoppers at Progressive.com.

I can certainly buy the hypothesis that in the long-run there are benefits to Progressive from the sponsorship. However, there doesn’t appear to be an immediate payoff in terms of traffic, quotes, or business.

With Memorial Day behind us, the summer driving season is officially underway. You probably heard that AAA estimated a decrease in motor traffic over the holiday weekend for the first time since 2002. But even if gas prices, which climbed another four cents while you were reading the last sentence, are finally beginning to impact leisure travel, millions of Americans who cannot cut back on driving to and from work are being forced to either absorb the high prices or find more creative ways of cutting consumption.

Some people have tried cutting out driving altogether, but most are turning to more fuel-efficient vehicles, including new hybrid models, decade-old Geo Metros and, increasingly, motor scooters with triple-digit MPGs. But heavyweight motorcycles, which still get two to three times the gas mileage of a typical sedan, aren’t enjoying the same sales bump, so one would expect there to be less interest in the heavyweights on the web. Au contraire!

Traffic to motorcycle companies’ websites typically increases through the first few months of a calendar year as weather improves, starting around February’s Bike Week in Daytona Beach and going right through the Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Rally in D.C. during Memorial Day weekend. The pattern certainly holds true this year, but what’s interesting about this graph is that most of the companies shown, despite being major scooter producers, had fewer visitors to their sites in April 2008 than in the same month in 2007. In fact, only Honda Powersports and Harley-Davidson posted year-over-year increases in traffic. Harley’s 22% rise in traffic is particularly impressive because of its premium-brand status and its absence from the bustling small-scooter market.

Harley-Davidson also leads the pack in keeping visitors on its site. The average stay per visit was just over 10 minutes for Harley-Davidson in April, 25% higher than its closest competitor, Kawasaki. So interest in the Harley brand is obviously still present, but that interest isn’t being converted to sales. (Harley-Davidson sales for Q1 2008 were down 5.6% compared to Q1 2007 and down 12.8% from Q4 2007.) With fuel efficiency on consumers’ minds and difficult economic conditions around for the immediate future, could Harley begin to position itself as a practical vehicle and still maintain its high-end brand image? Would Americans who are in market for a new vehicle buy into the idea that the hog they’ve always wanted is an increasingly sensible purchase? What do you think?

Dodge is in the midst of launching their new cross-over-utility vehicle, Journey, and is depending on more digital marketing than they ever have before. The Journey is a competitively priced mid-size crossover utility vehicle that Dodge is hoping will attract a high percentage of conquest customers to the brand.

Early in April, Dodge took over the homepage on AOL, Yahoo! and MSNBC advertising the Journey with a tie-in to their new corporate campaign. The period during the home page takeover drove internet attention for Dodge.com to near period highs.

Dodge.com’s attention over those days was driven by unique visitors to the Journey model page –peaking on April 11th at almost 50% of the sites total unique visitors.

So it appears the advertising worked, it drove traffic (increased unique visitors) and awareness (attention) of Journey. But was Dodge able to get the conquest prospects they were targeting?

Compete’s Behavior Match can help auto makers target a conquest audience with their advertising. By examining the density of competitive brand shoppers on those sites in the month prior to Dodge’s advertising, March of 2008, we can see which site might offer the best reach.

• MSNBC and AOL were both good sites for targeting competitive prospects, as they were more saturated with folks shopping competitive brands online than other sites.
• While yahoo.com had the largest number of people looking at all the brands, it indexed on par with the general population (98).
• By looking at the sites with the higher index, we see which sites were better locations for Journey to spend money. In this case, msnbc.com and aol.com had the richer vehicle shopping audience.

Targeting Journey advertising on msnbc.com and aol.com gave Dodge an opportunity to get the vehicle in front of competitive shoppers. If they are able to convert them into sales these are customers the brand will welcome with ”Open Arms.”

Yesterday, a colleague of mine was searching keyword results on Compete.com and came across an interesting, albeit surprising finding. When searching for the keywords “pickup trucks” not one OEM appeared in the top 25 destination sites. That means that Ford, Chevy, GMC or any of the other more recent additions to this market, were not top destination sites for people searching for pickup trucks.

So what’s the deal? Based on the list it would appear that people are researching, and a lot. Among the top 25 destination sites were traditional 3rd party sites like KBB and Edmunds as well sites that offer reviews like consumersearch.com, rankingsandreviews.com and pickuptruck.com.

But are OEMs sitting back and waiting for the 3rd parties to drive people to their sites? Are they relying on their vehicles to drive traffic into the showroom and ignoring online efforts? Do they even know they aren’t making the top 25? They do now…

On May 5 the UAW struck GM’s Fairfax assembly plant in Kansas City, which makes the hot-selling Chevrolet Malibu sedan. The strike comes at a particularly inopportune time as a prolonged work stoppage could severely hurt the tremendous momentum Malibu has built up since its launch in October.

Since launching in Q4, Malibu demand has soared to new highs, surpassing all other models market-wide in January. Record demand has also driven sales to new highs, reaching 16,879 units in April, putting constraints on inventory as supplies remained tight at 36 days. While demand has declined over the past two months it has remained 3 times higher compared to its level last year and it continues to be one of the most shopped models market-wide.

In April, Malibu conversion, defined as the ratio of sales to demand, hit 22%, more than double that of its peak launch demand in January. Malibu conversion has not been this strong since its incentive-laden sell down in Q3 2007. This improvement can be attributed to increased supplies of the new model. It also makes Malibu conversion competitive with segment leaders Camry and Accord.

Maintaining launch momentum in the face of a strike is critical and requires informed decision making. A prolonged strike may further constrain inventory at a time when supplies need to fall in line with vehicle demand. On top of that, the new Malibu continues to attract significant interest from import shoppers who have increasingly put Malibu on their list of vehicles to shop. Even the slightest hiccup could jeopardize Malibu’s momentum and put to the brakes on what has been one of GM’s most successful launches.

What can GM do? The strike will test GM’s mettle and ability to keep the momentum rolling. Chevrolet must continue its marketing support of Malibu to ensure robust demand once the strike is settled and supplies return to more acceptable levels. If demand falls when inventories return, heavy incentives will be a part of any solution to drive sales.

In the short term, Chevrolet can redirect some Malibu shoppers into Impala. The number of people shopping both models has increased to record highs in 2008. To keep these prospects from defecting to import rivals, Chevrolet should develop programs that incentivize dealers to redirect Malibu shoppers into Impala if the prospect is a defection risk. Better to keep them in the family than to lose them altogether.

On Monday, the Energy Information Association released its latest gas price data; the U.S. price at the pump (all grades) stood at $3.51 at the end of April, the highest price on record. The conversation surrounding oil prices and the economy has made the price of gas a hot topic across political debates and fuel economy a component of recent automotive campaigns.

Does the price of gas actually run the engine of automotive interest in the US? If you sell compact cars it sure does. Compete tracked monthly shopping, or demand, for the compact car segment and compared it to the monthly U.S. weighted average gasoline (all grades) prices over recent months. Compete measures in-market demand by looking across all popular 3rd-party sites and aggregates unique shopping behavior by observing how many people actually utilize shopping tools for every make and model.

Compete also compared demand and gas prices for the most popular hybrid and best-known fuel-efficient compact car, the only U.S. model to exclusively offer every trim as a hybrid: the Toyota Prius. It appears, and not surprisingly so, that shopping spikes and falls coincident with gas prices.

Since launching, the Prius has been synonymous with fuel efficiency and hybrid fervor. April marked the highest shopper count total for Prius on record. Prius was the 4th most shopped model in the U.S. in April, when it had over 124,000 shoppers in that month alone. To put that in perspective, 124,000 shoppers was more than the entire shopper total for more than 25 other makes. In other words, more people shopped for a Prius than for all BMW models combined. Prius had more shoppers than the Lexus brand had in total despite the recent Lexus “power of h“ hybrid featured ad campaign. More people shopped for Prius than for Chrysler, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Pontiac or GMC to drive the point a little further down the road.
Prius outperformed all models combined (from a unique count, a person could have shopped for more than one model within a make) for the above-mentioned makes and in doing so outperformed the entire make demand for more than 70% of all major makes selling cars or trucks in the U.S. today. Does Prius deserve to be its own make with a portfolio of models that sell off of the fuel-efficient brand promise?

Prius has demonstrated that the right message at the right time works. Better fuel economy messaging works when gas prices peak for compact cars, and Prius has the hook consumers are willing to fish for in a compact car segment that is growing. I haven’t met many people that expect a severe decline in gas prices in the future, which would lead me to conclude that Prius is destined for yet more attention and subsequent success. Could the Prius brand extend across a wider range of products? I think it could. It certainly has enough attention from consumers at the moment to share shoppers across more models.