Toyotires.eu Reports 352 per cent Increase in Web Traffic

As Toyo retained its 7th place ranking in this year’s online brand equity report, Toyo Tire Europe GmbH representatives have reported that the European headquarters’ website (toyotires.eu) has experienced a 352 per cent increase in visitors since the beginning of 2009. If you include growth since the company refreshed its online presence this time last year, traffic has actually grown by over 3000 per cent. Toyo marketing and strategic planning manager – Europe, Mike Rignall, gave Tyres & Accessories an overview of how the company has achieved this growth, and how it plans to sustain it.

While the tyre business in general has seen better years (although Mike Rignall points out that Toyo are experiencing a much better period at this end of the year), Toyo has clearly experienced strong online success in terms of digital marketing. Rignall wouldn’t put a figure on it, but T&A understands that Toyo sky-high percentage increase figures refer to unique users, which the Japanese tyre manufacturer uses as its preferred benchmarking metric. From Rignall’s perspective, the best part about the increasing figures is the fact that the growth is continuing to date. The number of unique users grew 23 per cent in August, for example, and another 24 per cent in September.

One of the key steps Toyo took was to analyse exactly who was visiting the site prior to its face lift last year. Looking at the pan-European’s site’s traffic breakdown revealed that large numbers of visitors were coming from Spain, Greece and France to a site that at that point was only available in English. As a result, the company has since launched Spanish, Greek and most recently French language versions of the European site, each on regional domains, styled in parallel with the main European site. “If you write in their language, the visitors come,” Rignall commented.

As a result of the translation work 52 per cent of Europeans can now read a Toyo website in their own language and estimated 76 per cent can in surf Toyo’s pages in a language they understand. A secondary benefit of this has been that the head office now has additional materials to distribute to each of its national distributors, all written in their native tongues.

Another addition to the Toyo Tire Europe online stable is toyomotosport.eu, which was launched at the beginning of September. Building on the successful introduction of local language websites, the new Motorsport website has been available in four European languages from the launch. News, motorsport product and technical information are all available in English, French, German and Spanish at the same address.

The site is divided into four discrete areas with information grouped together under the categories; circuit racing, drag racing, off-road racing and track day tyres.

The website also showcases the new Open Country M/T–R off road racing tyre. For the first time, it gives off-road race teams from all over Europe the ability to purchase these tyres where they do not yet have a Motorsport dealer covering their market. Over time the website will be updated to include the authorised Motorsport dealers for each market in Europe. Rignall explained that the motorsport site’s use of the Internet to sell these tyres directly to consumers is an exception. As far as the company’s other products are concerned, Toyo wants to leave consumer sales to its regional distributors. That said these regional distributors are reportedly doing an increasing amount of B2B business with their own customers via electronic technologies. Italy is said to be particularly strong in this respect.

One of the highlights of the year for Toyo’s website was its coverage of the Tunisia Rally earlier this year. However, while the event obviously brought new traffic with it, baseline viewing figures remained 60 per cent up even after the event. Likewise, Rignall explained, despite adding additional languages to Toyo Europe’s online presence, there has been no fall in the number of reader viewing the English language pages.

Looking forward to 2010, Rignall hopes to continue the momentum built up so far with a number of new initiatives. This could potentially include projects related to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, but Rignall ruled out advertising on the latter. Rather, the company is looking for a more considered approach: “Content is king. When it comes to social networking sites the users are very savvy and we will need to come up with creative ways of interacting with them.”

The European social networking landscape is also more complicated than other markets. While Twitter, Facebook, Bebo and MySpace rule in the UK, Rignall explained that there are up to 50 regional variants across Europe, each with niche penetration of the domestic markets.