Nowcasting New Car Registrations with Google Search Data and Car Manufacturers' Website Traffic

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is an attempt to nowcast (here: to predict in a short time horizon) new car registrations in Poland based on data of Google search queries and website traffic of car manufacturers. The study covers 47 monthly observations for six automotive makes. The strongest explanatory power is exhibited by the autoregressive component (number of registrations lagged one month), followed by the number of search queries. The website traffic of car manufacturers significantly influences the number of registrations in two out of six cases.

Keywords: nowcasting, prediction, car, automotive, Internet, search, Google, website traffic, Poland, CEE