All told, consumers spent nearly two billion minutes shopping on Cars.com properties in 2017.[i] This figure is the equivalent of 33 million hours, 1.4 million days, 45,600 months, or 3,800 years. In that time, you could travel to Mars and back about 2,850 times[ii] — and if Elon Musk succeeds, Mars will indeed be a new frontier.

As 2017 comes to a close, we’ve analyzed Cars.com’s real-time behavioral data to determine where shoppers are spending their time while they research and shop for their next car. The data reveals clear connections between offline events and online actions — here are some highlights:

  1. Football fans put down their wings to shop for cars during the Big Game.

Car companies that aired ads during the Big Game averaged a 7 percent lift to their brand pages on Cars.com, and a 238 percent lift to pages on Cars.com for models that were specifically called out[iii]. New England had 12.3% more vehicle shopper traffic than Atlanta.[iv]

  1. As millions of women marched across the country on January 21, car shopping stalled – underscoring the power that women have in car purchasing.

More than 60 percent of women are the sole decision makers when they go car shopping.[v] Not surprisingly, on the day of the Women’s March, shopper activity was down by 8.4 percent.

  1. American consumers went dark during the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse — except for those shopping the out-of-production Mitsubishi Eclipse.

During the 90 minutes (11 a.m. to 2 p.m. CDT) it took for the eclipse to travel the 2,600 miles across the continent, page views were down 15 percent week over week. There was, however, a 62 percent uptick in searches for used Mitsubishi Eclipses and an 11 percent increase on new Mitsubishi brand vehicle searches.[vi]

For more insight, please check out the following video and infographic.

 

[i] comScore Media Matrix Multi-Platform Jan. 1-Oct. 2017.

[ii] NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/offices/marsplanning/faqs/, Nov. 2017

[iii] Cars.com Internal Data, February 2017.

[iv] Cars.com Internal Data, November 2017.

[v] Cars.com Internal Data, November 2017 (VDP impressions on Jan 21 vs. the prior Saturday); Cars.com Female Consumer Metrics, July 2016.

[vi] Cars.com Internal Data, November 2017.