With the cost of gas reaching new highs in recent weeks, consumers are looking to hybrid vehicles as a way to reduce spend on gasoline. Among the most popular hybrid car models, searches on the term ‘prius’ increased by 200% when comparing the week ending March 12, 2011 and February 12, 2011. Searches for ‘toyota prius’ also increased 167% during the same time period and surpassed the term ‘chevy volt’. The search activity around other hybrid models such as ‘ford escape hybrid’, ’2011 ford fusion’, and ‘ford fusion hybrid’, and ‘sonata hybrid’ have also been higher in recent weeks.

In addition to hybrids, consumers were also searching for information on fuel efficient cars and other mileage related searches. Searches related to gas mileage reached a 12 month high last week and increased 29% from the previous peak during the week ending January 15, 2011.

Searchers were very interested in getting the most miles with their current automobiles as evidenced by the increase in searches on ‘increase your gas mileage’ month over month, with 9 out of the top 10 search terms ranked by growth having no activity last month. Travel planning term ‘trip gas mileage calculator’ also experienced an increase in searches during the same time period.

The top downstream website is the United States Department of Energy website FuelEconomy.gov, which provides information about gas mileage, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution ratings and safety information for new and used cars and trucks. Car research and classifieds sites Edmunds.com, Cars.com, KBB.com and AutoTrader.com also appeared among the top sites that received traffic from gas mileage terms, with only Cars.com relying upon solely organic traffic. One interesting strategy was from Chevron who created an energy discussion and awareness site, Will You Join Us, and used paid search to drive traffic.

Thanks to James Varughese, an Analyst in our Custom Data & Analytics team for this analysis on gas prices & hybrids.