With the economy improving and people spending on personal luxury again, the automotive industry is seeing a huge surge in sales. Over the past two quarters Indian manufacturers have had record numbers.
Here’s a quick check at how the auto portals of India are doing in terms of traffic.
While Carwale was a dominant player for a long time in the space, other players like CarDekho.com and Gaadi.com are catching up fast. As the graph suggests CarDekho.com is emerging as the leader and the loss is clearly being borne by Carwale. Team-BHP was able to hold on as #2 for a long time but its growth is now flattening.
Car buying decisions involve a lot of data and research. And all of this action begins at Google. With car buying being a one time event it is wrong to believe that there is any loyalty in customers towards a particular site. A decision time would be anything between around 7-15 days, over which a prospective buyer looks for good reviews and more data. And then forgets about it all until his next purchase. So quality content and strong SEO is the name of the game, else you have to spend a lot of advertising $$.
Earlier, a market study by Google suggested that 40% car buyers research online before any decision. (More here)
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
