Hyundai to Watch Web’s Offline Effect

Hyundai Motor America will take a closer look at the online research and shopping behavior of car seekers to better tailor its marketing efforts in the offline world.

That’s the significance of a deal it announced yesterday with Compete Inc., a Boston-based online market research firm. Compete will help Hyundai measure the success of its various marketing and promotional efforts–including TV, print and Internet advertising–to see how they affect traffic at Hyundai-related Web sites.

Compete uses research and behavioral data from 10 million users derived from partnerships with Internet service and desktop application providers. Click streams are “de-identified” to remove personal information and tracked based on a client’s needs and the requirements of a specific project. Compete applies analytic tools tailored to specific vertical markets — primarily the automotive, wireless, and retail banking markets.

In the case of the automotive market, examining the behavior of “in-market” shoppers can provide insight into marketing effectiveness, optimum incentive offers, and future demand for specific models or vehicle types, said Lincoln Merrihew, director of Compete’s automotive practice.

“Compete has come up with a way to measure the number and behavior of in-market and active auto shoppers,” he said. “With that information, Hyundai or any car company can understand two very important things: How effective their advertising is at creating demand, and the power of incentives. Right now companies think they know that incentives drive sales. But they don’t know if shoppers just need a little push, or if a really big push to write a check.”

Compete can track consumer behavior across Web sites and over time, Merrihew said, to detect a consumer looking at a Hyundai Sonata site on Monday and a Honda Accord site on Wednesday, together with what elements that buyer explores on each of those sites. Compete can track car buyers from their first search engine click on Google or Yahoo! through the official Hyundai site to independent sites such as Autobytel or Kelly Blue Book. The platform includes technology that allows Compete to analyze visitor behavior without counting individual shoppers more than once.

Without such a metric tool, Merrihew said the auto industry can wind up spending billions on ads or purchase incentives without any uniform, replicable way to measure their part in the buying decision. “We can determine if Pontiac running an ad during ‘The Apprentice’ helped boost their marketing for two days or two weeks,” he said. “Or if another company upped their incentives by $1,000, did anybody pay attention?”

The Internet is one of the best places to examine the car marketing process and study the mentality of the auto shopper. The purchase decision in the auto industry is a complex one and the Web has permanently altered traditional car-buying patterns. Seventy percent of consumers now evaluate vehicles online before buying, Merrihew said.

“The auto industry is unique in that it has 300 models, all very different from one another, and with so much associated information — horsepower, gas mileage and the like,” he said. “Because the item purchase in so complex, consumers need someplace to gather data. We use the Internet to collect behavior, but it doesn’t reflect behavior only on the Internet. If you run a good magazine ad, you’re hoping it will show up in Internet behavior.”