Bill Tancer, the general manager of Hitwise and author of Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters, blogged here earlier this week about Internet trends and data. This is the second of three posts on the subject.
One of the things that I’ve learned from monitoring the Hitwise aggregate search behavior of 10 million Internet users in the U.S. is that, as a group, we have a remarkably short attention span.
Take any big newsworthy event, if gore or nudity is not at play in the story; expect the spike in Internet searches and resulting site visits on that event to last no more than one week. Rising gas prices are no exception — until recently.
If we chart the visits to sites that provide gas station comparison shopping (sites like gasbuddy.com) against average U.S. gas prices (all grades), we find examples of short-lived hyper sensitivity in September 2005 when retail prices crossed the $3.00 per gallon line, and then again in May 2006 as we approached that same price. It’s interesting to note that subsequent surges past $3.00 per gallon have been met with ever declining visits to gas comparison sites.
Even though gas prices maintained their high levels for several weeks, as Internet searchers we were on to other topics beyond finding the cheapest place to fuel up.
Since this Spring however, gas comparison shopping is showing steady increases indicating that as we hover around $4.00 per gallon, we may have reached a point where getting the most fuel for our money becomes a more integral part of our lives.
To understand this trend further, I analyzed the demographics of visitors to the most visited gas comparison site, gasbuddy.com, over the last four weeks. Visitors to the site were predominantly older (49.57 percent of site visitors were 55 years old or older) with fixed or lower incomes and 47.34 percent were from households earning under $60,000 per year).
This is a dramatic departure from the demographics of that same site in June 2007. At that time, the largest income segment of visitors to the site was households earning over $150,000 per year (25.69 percent). Today the upper income segment accounts for only 9.6 percent of Gasbuddy’s site visitors.
Historically — adding validation to the adage that you have to save money to make money — households earning over $150,000 per year were the most likely to visit comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Beyond.com, but in the case of surging gas prices, Internet behavioral data indicates that finding the best price is becoming more of a necessity for those on lower or fixed incomes.
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If the data above represents searches related to gas prices, then wouldn’t it make sense to conclude or at least posit that people didn’t search quite as much because folks most interested in the subject had already “found” the price comparison and price data sites they were searching for?
Oops – apparently “as Internet searchers” threw me off a bit. Still, the point holds with a slight modification – if you assume that the hits to the various sights, taken as a whole, contain duplicates… Then it would be natural for the number of hits to decline overall as people settled into a routine of checking their favored gas price website.
Like most people I visit these sites only when they’re linked to in an online article. The fluctuations are likely caused entirely by the different media that link to them. These sites were a novelty in June 07, and upmarket publications discussed them at that time. Newsweek online linked to them on 5/15, that’s where the prole traffic comes from.
Have you paid any attention to the results of any search on GasBuddy over time? What I find is that, with great consistency, the same 1 or 2 stations in every place I visit, always have the lowest prices. Once I’ve found the cheapest station, i don’t really need to go back.
@Witty Nickname-
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get up to the minute, accurate price data from the more than 200K gas stations all around the country? They represent thousands of separate companies and most are not connected to the internet. so they’re doing pretty well. and you get the info for free, so build a better mousetrap or shut up.
Silly. Gas is primarily a convenience purchase. I pass, or come near about 10 gas stations every day. I know which to avoid (all Shell stations) and which to pay attention to…ARCO, Independents, a few Chevrons. If a web search showed me I could save 3-5 cents per gallon, and it too me more than 5 minutes out of my way…not a chance. The web is only a valid search for fuel if you are a trucker, need 300 gallons at a time,a nd can save more than a nickel a gallon..easily.
Nathan and A.S. both arrived at what is probably the biggest driving force between the relation to Gasbuddy hits over time – when prices first soared a huge spike occurred as savvy buyers found the closest, cheapest stations across their route.
Fido comes up with an equally valid point about direct media mention of specific sites, although I feel that this would require more specific analysis of the number of times Gasbuddy, specifically, was mentioned in various news media over the same time periods.
The article’s main interest is the relationship in average income to site visits. While I find it difficult to explain the June 07′ 150k+ percentage I feel that Fido’s theory best fits the data. The current percentage of lower income visits most likely represents the increase in how gas prices are affecting those with fixed incomes as they stay at elevated levels over time. Even fixed incomes are rarely completely fixed. Most fixed income individuals have at least a reasonable amount of floating money in checking or bank savings accounts they can easily withdraw. As gas prices stay elevated and this money evaporates many people will only then realize the effect and cost gas is having on them. Still, that is pure conjecture
Bob History’s (comment no. 12) experience is the same as mine.