The Best Place to Find New Vehicle Buyers Online: Not Where You Thought They Would Be Posted by Arianne Walker

The Best Place to Find New Vehicle Buyers Online: Not Where You Thought They Would Be Posted by Arianne Walker

Understanding where exactly to locate new-vehicle buyers online is challenging, especially when you want to make sure your marketing message is seen by new vehicle buyers.  In the past, demographic targeting and behavioral targeting were the only ways to find your target audience online.  The good news is that there is now a way to target that new-vehicle buyer online using the true behavior of verified new-vehicle buyers. 

The J.D. Power and Associates/Compete Inc. 2009 In-Market Buyer Behavior (IMBB) Tool is designed to help automotive marketers and media planners determine where and how to allocate their online advertising and marketing communications resources in the most targeted manner.  This tool uses clickstream technology to examine new-vehicle buyer Web site visitation in the 6 months prior to purchase.  Now auto marketers and media planners have the ability to answer challenging questions surrounding their online marketing activities such as:

• Which Web sites best reach the target audience?
• What portion of media budget should be spent on each site?
• How much time are target vehicle buyers spending on these sites?

In-Market Buyer Behavior allows you to compare thousands of sites from a variety of categories.  Let's take a look at just how well lifestyle sites can deliver new-vehicle buyers in the month of purchase.  In the Wave 2 release (November 2009) we see that quality health.com has roughly 2 million unique visitors in a month, which is about one-third of edmunds.com's 6 million monthly visitors.  However, the In-Market Buyer Behavior tool highlights the composition differences between the two sites.   In this particular case, quality health.com's index of 1,845 (that is, a new-vehicle buyers is over 18 times more likely to be on the quality health.com site compared to the general Internet population) is much stronger than popular automotive site edmunds.com's index of 325.


This occurs because so much of edmunds.com traffic is made up of shoppers who either initially intend or ultimately end up buying used, as well as visitors who are not in-market at all. We can also observe that in the month of purchase quality health.com delivers 159,258 new-vehicle buyers to edmunds' 81,447 buyers.  Having information like this allows you to target more effectively and efficiently, and perhaps even leverage the cost structure of current relationships.

Targeting even further into the type of new-vehicle buyers is also possible with this tool, going all the way down to specific vehicle segments and customizable competitive sets.  Want to target effectively for the new Mercedes-Benz C-class?  What works for some segments doesn't necessarily work for all segments.  Take babycenter.com for example, only 3% of Midsize Conventional buyers (which includes vehicles such as the Toyota Camry and Ford Fusion) are visiting the site in the month of purchase with an index of 120.  On the other hand, 13% of Compact Premium Conventional buyers (which includes vehicles such as the Mercedes-Benz C-class, and the BMW 3-Series) visit in the month of purchase (index of 507).  Nuggets such as these are not only possible to find using this In-Market Buyer Behavior tool, it is what the tool was designed for.


This isn't to suggest that automotive marketers shouldn't place advertising on automotive sites.  Quite the contrary: segment by segment, the more traditional third-party automotive sites also provide different levels of targeting efficiencies.  Understanding which vehicle segments and competitive sets are best suited for advertising dollars among the third party sites also provides opportunities for efficiencies and smart marketing decisions.  For example, taking the same vehicle segment as above, the compact premium conventional segment, it is possible to identify a site like automotive.com, which has an index of 216 compared to the general new-vehicle buyer market.  That is, beyond a higher propensity for this segment of buyers to visit automotive.com compared to the general Internet population, they are also more likely to visit automotive.com as compared to the new-vehicle buyer population. 


In order to learn more about how you can use these new tools, please contact your J.D. Power and Associates account representative.

Thank you,
Thomas Ieracitano
Thomas@Ieracitano.com
http://DigitalCarGuy.com
(229) 251-2462