Auto buyers return to market, continue to out-perform broader economy
Nashville, TN — The Dataium ASI index, a leading predictive indicator of automotive sales, showed the largest month over month gain in the past four months, indicating that 2011 vehicle sales are on track to post around a 10% increase in sales volume over last year. Although average lead and visitor counts on automotive websites were down in September, conversion rate (leads per unique visitor), a key metric in determining future sales, was up 10% from August for all automotive brands.
"It is encouraging to see the Automotive Sales Index (ASI) up again this month with a stronger trend line," stated Eric Brown, CEO of Dataium. He added, "We anticipate continued sales growth despite some weakening components of the ASI index. Also within the index, the increases in search volume indicate a positive lead volume moving forward."
In terms of lead volume, luxury brands, Infiniti and Land Rover, led all makes, increasing 34% and 29% respectively over the previous month. Jeep posted the highest gains (10%) of the domestic brands (GM, Ford and Chrysler), with Chrysler following close behind, gaining 9%. Still recovering from post-quake inventory shortages, two of the Japanese brands, Toyota and Honda were down 33% and 17% respectively.
The highest auto shopper lead conversion rate of the domestic brands went to the Ford F-150 truck, up 18% from the previous month. In comparison, imports from Korea and Japan blew away the competition with the Hyundai Genesis posting 54% gains, and the Nissan Versa up 46%.
Through proprietary data collection and analytics, Dataium aggregates and measures billions of auto shopper behavioral events from over 30 million active auto shoppers across a network of diverse 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 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, 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 over 20 million active auto shoppers. The company supports cutting-edge data collection and reporting technology; VisiCogn® Collection Utility, VisiCogn® Knowledge Center, VisiCogn® INSITE, 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).
10/18/11
