11/07/08

MIAMI --- Valuable / interesting stats from Cars.com at the ICMA conference, presented by Sharon Knitter:

- Cars.com Web traffic declines on weekends, but mobile Cars.com traffic increases.
- Almost 40 percent of users of mobile Cars.com accessed the site while on a dealer lot.
- Surprisingly, 30 percent of the users of the mobile Cars.com site are first-time users to the company --- meaning they haven't visited the Web site previously.
- Page views on mobile are about 10 per visit (although Knitter said that's very tough to track), compared with about 13 average.
- Cars.com invested only about $40,000 to $50,000 to launch its mobile application, with CrispWireless, and has spent about $200,000 so far on development and technology.
- Advertising on the mobile tool was sold out from March through December this year, although it's recently had some falloff due to manufacturers pulling out. (Tough economic times, especially for auto manufacturers.)
- Cars.com will in about two weeks start launching mobile mini-sites for its dealers. Unlike the mobile Cars.com product, these will be dealer-specific.
- Mobile is providing about 3 to 5 percent of Cars.com's total page-views, "but we look at that as 3 to 5 percent that we wouldn't have had," said Knitter, the company's senior director for consumer products. "We think this is going to be a huge advertising platform in a few years, and we felt we had to be here."