ViziSense, Asia Pacific's leading online audience and ad measurement platform has released its first customized report on the online behavior of potential car buyers in India titled ‘The Virtual World of the Car Buyer’. This comprehensive report has been compiled by analyzing the online activity of over 5000+ users (from the ViziSense India panel of over 1,10,000 users) in the year 2010.
As per the report, Automobile websites have seen a growth in traffic of 50% in 2010 while the passenger car industry grew 31%* during the same period. The growth indicates the surge in the use of virtual showrooms by potential car buyers to seek information and take decisions around their car purchases. The frequency of new car launches in 2010 and focused digital activities by OEMs around these launches also ensured high traction in visits to OEM websites.
Some of the insights drawn by the study:
·A huge 33% of all potential online car buyers are interested in cars above Rs 6 lakhs. This number is 45% for cars between Rs 3 -6 lakhs. The share of such cars in the passenger car market is seen at around 25%. This shows affluence of online users and their ability to drive higher purchases of the Rs 6 lakh+ segment of cars ·Chandigarh, Indore and Coimbatore figure as the key cities beyond the Top 8 Metros which see high interest from potential online car buyers· First-hand ownership experience related to a new car purchase, dealership and service experience etc., which would be equivalent to word-of-mouth in the offline world, is seen as a huge social influencer for potential online car buyers and is also preferred to ‘expert’ car reviews ·Within OEMs, the Tata Motors online properties sees the highest interest by potential car buyers Potential online car buyers have been defined as users who have either visited an automobile website more than once in a month, or have visited more than one automobile website in a month or have specifically searched for a car brand / model.
Commenting on the release of the report, Amit Bhartiya, GM and VP, ViziSense said “The current breed of car buyers seek much more information around cars, want to compare attributes and features across segments and also seek first hand ownership experience to make informed yet quick decisions. Automobile websites play a huge role in facilitating this information and have crunched the overall car purchase cycle. The recently closed acquisition of Carwale is a testament to the increasingly important role of the internet in influencing purchases of passenger cars. We are excited to release a host of valuable insights revealed by over 5000 potential car buyers over a 6-month period through this report”.
The report contains insights around preferred segments, brands, comparisons of brands, fuel-type, features and attributes etc. witnessed on automobile websites which includes both, automobile portals (like CarWale) as well as OEM websites.
