Nashville, TN — Dataium, the largest aggregator of online automotive shopper behavior, today released its monthly ASI report. The ASI (Automotive Shopper Intensity) index, a leading predictive indicator of automotive retail sales, saw its first decline in May since January, partly due to consumers staying in market longer than previous months – extending the buying cycle from 30-45 days to 60 days. Dataium expects a persistent softening in the retail market as consumers continue to face a deteriorating economy. In fact, the SAAR may have been much worse if fleet sales hadn’t accounted for over twenty percent of sales in the month of May. Will Perry, Director of Business Intelligence at Dataium stated, "We have been seeing the ASI soften for several months, highlighting longer term concerns for the overall market."

Although Toyota dealer websites saw slight declines in visitors and searches in May, leads for the automaker grew 5% from the previous month allowing it to regain the top spot and rank the highest in ASI of all manufacturers. Fellow Japanese car maker Nissan, aided by its National Tent Event sales campaign, saw its leads grow 14% from the previous month, which ushered its rank to second. Inventory searches and leads on Ford's dealer websites fell by 9% and 8% respectively, dragging the domestic automaker down to third.

Toyota's winning streak continued for the fourth straight month with the Toyota Camry ranking highest in shopper intensity for new vehicles. Bolstered by its annual sales blitz, Toyota's RAV4, Corolla, and Prius joined the Camry ranking in the top 10 of new vehicles with the highest ASI. A redesign, coupled with rebates and incentives on the Nissan Altima, helped vault the model to second.

The current economic climate, including concerns regarding the European Union, may have begun to impact the high-end car segment and resulted in a number of luxury vehicles, including the Hyundai Equus, Audi A7, Jaguar XF and BMW 335i receiving the lowest ASI ranking of new vehicles in May. However, a number of luxury OEMs foresaw the trend and increased their sales and marketing efforts to successfully combat the downturn. For instance, auto leads for Infiniti grew by 17% from the previous month, driven by its decision to have a spring sales event this year.

Eric Brown, "This month, the impact of new models, sales events, and incentives were apparent with Toyota, Nissan and Infiniti showing strength in a declining market. Congrats to these makes for correctly anticipating the changes in the marketplace and responding accordingly."

Through proprietary data collection and analytics, Dataium aggregates and measures billions of auto shopper behavioral events from a database of over 100 million active auto shoppers across a network of diverse of thousands of automotive websites. Dataium not only provides data and research on auto shopper/buyer behavior nationally, but by specific makes, models, vehicle segments, and markets, as well. The national report is available for download at www.dataium.com/library. Dataium reports and dashboards are available on a subscription basis or may be customized to access real-time updates to measure in-market lead behavior, sales forecasting, advertising effectiveness, digital marketing performance, and website design proficiency.

To request complete access to Dataium's ASI predictive modeling tool on future consumer demand by make, model, trim level, segment, region, and market, contact Dataium at www.dataium.com/contact, or call 877-896-DATA (3282).

About Dataium, LLC
Dataium is the largest aggregator of Internet automotive shopping activity. With its Cloud Intelligence® platform, the company collects, analyzes, and indexes billions of online automotive shopping events from a database of over 100 million active auto shoppers, each week. The company supports cutting-edge data collection and reporting technology; VisiCogn® Collection Utility, VisiCogn® Knowledge Center, and is also known for its ASI™ index. For more information, visit www.dataium.com, email: info@dataium.com, or call 877-896-DATA (3282).

06/18/12