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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

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Car hire / rental – search habits and top destinations

August 20, 2008

Summer is the busiest time for car hire companies, and this applies to their websites as well. We’ve recently carried out some analysis of car hire search behaviour in the UK, and I wanted to share some of the key finding here. A quick note on methodology: we created customer category of 100+ car hires sites and then categorized almost 2,000 search terms sending it traffic for the 12 weeks ending 02/08/2008). We tagged these search terms based on the occurrence of certain key words, such as a brand, location or car type.

The chart below illustrates the importance of the different types of keywords. We’ve used two metrics: the volume of searches containing each type of keyword, and the actual number search terms containing each type of keyword (equivalent to the Search Term Breadth metric in the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence tool). As you can, the most frequently occurring key phrases are locations - e.g. the searcher specifying a particular country or city, such as Spain, Florida or Dublin. 41.6% of searches sending traffic to car hire websites specified a location, while 71.6% of actual search term included a location. The reason these numbers are different is because many of the search terms specifying a location are found in the long tail, and therefore don’t receive a huge number of searches.

The 10 most searched for locations were: Spain (included 25.7% of searches), UK (25.0%), USA (10.4%), France (8.7%), Italy (5.4%), Portugal (4.6%), Cyprus (3.0%), Ireland (2.0%), Greece (1.9%), and Canada (1.8%). As you can see from the chart below, although the UK and Spain are almost equal in terms of search volume, there are many more search terms containing UK destinations. The long tail strikes again: whereas many of the Spanish searches centre around popular terms such as, ‘car hire spain’, ‘car hire in spain’, ‘car hire alicante’ and ‘car hire majorca’, the list of low volume location specific searches in the UK is huge, from ‘inverness airport car hire’ to ‘car hire isle of wight’.

There were also differences in how people search for different countries. For example, searches for locations in the US, Australia and New Zealand are much more likely to include a brand than searches for European locations. Branding is important in the car hire sector, and 51% of searches included a brand (the 5 most searched for brands were Avis, Enterprise, Hertz. Europcar and Holiday Autos). Although they are less brand loyal, people searching for European car hire are more price sensitive. Many of the 7.7% of searches that included a ‘price’ term (such as ‘cheap’, ‘compare’ or ‘comparison’) also included a European location.

Returning to the first chart, you can see that almost 5% of searches specified a particular type of vehicle. The majority of these were searching for van hire, often in quite specific UK locations, although there were some searches for other specific vehicles such as mini-busses, 7 seaters, 4x4s / SUVs, and convertibles. The ‘pick up’ searches in the first graph refer to searches that specified a particular pick up location. The vast majority of these were airports but the list also included railway stations. Interestingly these type of searches also attracted the highest levels of paid search, which accounted for 60% of all clicks.

Our final insight relates to the ‘hire’ vs. ‘rental’ debate: 53% of searches contained a variation on the term ‘car hire’, but only 16% included a variation on the term ‘rent’. So ‘hire’ searches are much more popular, but ‘rental’ cannot be ignored. In particular, many of the most popular branded searches featured the term, including ‘national car rental’, ‘enterprise car rental’, ‘budget car rental’, ‘avis car rental’, and ‘dollar rent a car’. People looking for cars in America are the most likely to use a ‘rental’ term, presumably believing that by using the local parlance they will be more successful.

To find out more about branding, download a copy of or new report, Managing Your Brand Online (written in conjunction with our colleagues at Experian Integrated Marketing).

As always, we urge you to follow Hitwise UK on Twitter to keep up with the latest Internet data and trends.

Tweet Posted by Robin Goad at 04:00 PM | (3) | (0)
In Categories Branding | Search | Travel

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