The used car market is reporting the most dominant search terms-- the top 15 automotive search terms in recent months included "used cars" and centered around several car sites that include car research, such as Cars.com. This may partially be due to the fact that used car terms have several audiences, including new car buyers looking at resale value, car owners looking for trade-in values and used car buyers looking at price ranges. Search terms were gathered from searches of all major search engines among unique visitors that landed on any automotive OEM or third-party auto site.
"Kelly Blue Book" has been the dominant search term for auto site visitors for the past three months. In December 2005, it was followed by the terms "Autotrader", "Carsdirect" and "cars.com".
Most individual OEM sites had fewer unique visitors in December 2005 compared to November 2005. In fact, only 14 of 35 manufacturers, including Buick, posted gains from November to December. Unique visitors to Buick.com increased for two consecutive months, month-over-month. A unique visitor is defined as a unique internet user who accesses a site. If an individual visits a given site twice in one month, he or she is counted as a single unique visitor, to avoid double counting.
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