What happens on Auto Trader when the Queen is on TV?

As you might expect, we’re receiving lots of questions at the moment about what we’re seeing on our platform and in the wider market, and how potential car buyers are responding to the current situation. Thanks to our scale and data capabilities, we’re also able to observe some interesting social trends and can spot wider social behaviour.

If we look first at car buyer visits to Auto Trader in general, we track our performance compared to our competition, using a third party called Similar Web. We’ve created an automotive category to do this, looking at Auto Trader, Car Gurus, Pistonheads, Motors, Carwow, Cinch, Heycar and Cazoo. We can see that in the week up to 2nd April, the overall category is down 47% vs last year, with the drop more pronounced on mobile compared to desktop, as a result of more of us staying at home and not undertaking our daily commute. Looking at our own internal data our decline in traffic has now stabilised and is only down -30% year-on-year (YoY) for daily visits, which means we are still being visited by 750,000 – 800,000 potential car buyers every day.

So, we know we’re still getting visits to our site, but they’re just browsing, right? Well our data tells a different story. The number of adverts being viewed is stable at 5.3 – 6.1m per day which is around -25% down vs this period last year. It’s true, that could still indicate browsing behaviour, however the most encouraging sign is that we’re still generating around 8,000 enquiries sent to retailers every day, which is only -20% down on what we’d usually expect and less of a reduction compared to visits and advert views. We’re also still recording over 7,000 saved adverts per day and we saw an increase on that over the weekend, resulting in a growth of around +8% YoY. What this tells me is that those consumers who are visiting are showing genuine interest in car buying, or at least preparing for purchase once the current restrictions on movement have been lifted. They’re doing their research and getting purchase ready.

What about the Queen, though?

Our platform typically reflects major social or cultural events and when Her Majesty took to the airwaves to address the nation on Sunday evening, we saw a significant dip in activity on our platform, similar to what we’ve observed during the NHS #clapforcarers.

If you didn’t catch the webinar, you can see me talk through this data and watch the other sections by viewing on demand here.