The wildly successful ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program ended on Monday and is already being credited with helping to push automotive sales up in August after nearly 700,000 cars were replaced. Last week, the search term ‘cash for clunkers’ ranked 3rd for driving traffic to the Automotive category behind ‘ebay motors’ and ‘kelley blue book’. The top websites to receive traffic from the term ‘cash for clunkers’ last week was the government website Cars Allowance Rebate System, General Motors, and Cash for Clunkers Bill. Not surprisingly, the automotive manufacturers were among the top paid search advertisers when comparing the ratio of paid to organic traffic for each of the websites.

We all know the program was popular, especially after running short of funds early on, but where were the auto shoppers located? The Top DMAs (designated market area) to visit the Cars Allowance Rebate System website by overall share of traffic were Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY and Chicago, Il, but those cities tend to always be on top due to size. When we index the DMAs against the online population, the top DMAs were Utica, NY and Biloxi-Gulfport, MS, which gives a view of the cities where the online car shoppers that were trying to take advantage of the program are likely to be found.

The highest share of visits to the Cars Allowance Rebate System website and the websites of the top 5 automotive manufacturers (in terms of sales through the program as reported by the Department of Transportation), were from those with a HH income of $30k to $99.9k for the 4 weeks ending August 22, 2009. Together, these two HH income brackets represented more than half of the visits to each of the websites and those making $30k to $59.9k represented the largest share across all of the websites.