TOYOTA AND NISSAN BANK ON ONLINE SPONSORSHIPS

By: Randy Rubin

January 18, 2007

In December, Automotive News reported on OEM’s Internet marketing activities. Three automakers highlighted for their backing of internet-only shows were Toyota, Nissan, and Honda. Toyota is promoting the RAV4 by sponsoring a video trailer for the Fox TV series “24” at 24trailer.com. Nissan has been promoting the Versa through a sponsorship of the “StarTomorrow” music competition. Honda has been promoting the Fit through a sponsorship of “Cube Fabulous,” an online series. Compete compared these three online marketing efforts by averaging the unique visitors (UVs) by site per month and the average length of time spent on each site per month.

On average, the Nissan sponsored contest site startomorrow.com has been visited the most with 64,500 visitors on an average month. Toyota’s partner, 24trailer.com, was a close second with an average of 60,000 visitors. However, 24trailer.com has more engaged visitors based on time spent on site. Visitors to 24trailer.com spend an average of 4 minutes and 40 seconds on the site, twice the length of the trailer, the only content on the site. In comparison, startomorrow.com average time spent was 4 minutes. Honda’s online content effort attracted the least amount of visitors who also spent the least amount of time among the three sites.

Benchmarking against key rivals to set objectives and measure campaign effectiveness enables automotive marketers to determine which tactics are working and which tactics might need to be refined.

KELLEY BLUE BOOK TOP OF MIND AMONG AUTOMOTIVE SEARCHERS

73% of online automotive consumers search for third-party sites over OEM sites, making competition for key terms fierce. Compete tracks search terms from all search engines as part of our Search Intelligence service. Typically, automotive consumers have searched for third-party sites, specifically Kelley Blue Book and AutoTrader.

In November, Kelley Blue Book dominated the automotive search term list. Of the top 20 automotive search terms, one in five was for Kelley Blue Book (see highlighted terms in table). Variations of “Kelley Blue Book” terms have been among the top automotive search terms historically as well. Variations of AutoTrader.com also made the Top-20 list. Both of these sites are leaders among third-party sites in traffic as well.

Search Intelligence, in conjunction with online consumer research, can provide a richer picture of how efficient and effective search terms are as a referral source. Marketers can utilize this intelligence to benchmark rival search strategies and to quantify how much of their branded search traffic might be going to competitive sites or aggregators.