Carvana Sees 41% Web Traffic Decline; CarGurus Leads with 39 Million Website Visits

February 2023 auto retailer update

Similarweb’s latest look at the auto industry shows Cargurus.com led in share of traffic among car-selling peers for the month of February 2023 (based on a look at eight leading peers) with a 25% share of traffic.

In terms of web traffic growth Cars.com, for the third consecutive month, saw the most growth on a year-over-year basis (22%), followed by Truecar.com with 19% growth and Carmax with a 14% gain. Carvana saw a 41% year-over-year web traffic decline, and Vroom saw a 48% drop in traffic.

Other metrics that stood out include:

• Cargurus led in share of traffic for the month of February with 25% of this peer group, followed by Cars.com with 19% and Auto Trader with 16%
• Six of the top eight auto retailers saw year-over-year growth, with only Carvana and Vroom.com seeing traffic declines. On a monthly basis, all eight retailers saw traffic drop from January.
• Given their large drop in web traffic, Carvana gained six percentage points of traffic share among the peers in this group, and Vroom lost 1.2 percentage points of share.

Web traffic growth shows Cars.com performed best, Vroom, Carvana worst

We watch web traffic to these auto retailers as a proxy for overall demand, as many of them sell cars directly online, and in many cases, consumers visit the websites before making in-person visits as well. The chart below shows the change in web traffic on a year-over-year basis. You can see clearly that Cars.com saw major growth while Vroom and Carvana performed the worst.

Month-over-month growth shows February was seasonally weak

Versus the month of January, you can see that each car retailer saw a seasonal decline in web traffic, with Carmax seeing the smallest decline (-5.1%), followed by Car Gurus (-5.3%) and Cars.com (-5.6%). Carvana again performed the worst (-18%), and Vroom was the second worst (-16%).

Share of traffic finds Cargurus leading, Vroom lagging

Of course, while momentum is important, size still matters. The below chart shows the relative market share of each company in the peer group relative to each other (share of traffic). You can see CarGurus leads with 25%, followed by Cars.com at 19%, Auto Trader at 16% and KBB at 13%. Vroom, now barely registers in this peer group with only a 1.2% share, half what it was a year ago.

Changes in share of traffic show Carvana, Vroom performing the worst

Finally, we took a look at shifts in share of traffic year-over-year, and you can see that Carvana (-6.0%) and Vroom (-1.2%) performed terribly, while Cars.com (+3%) and Auto Trader (+1%) did the best.

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Methodology

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by Jim Corridore

Senior Analyst

Jim provides insights across multiple sectors. With 30 years on Wall Street and numerous awards for stock-picking, he is a SUNY Albany graduate.