• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 29, 2011

Facebook refers nearly as much new-vehicle buyer traffic to automaker Web sites as independent automotive content providers, such as Autotrader.com, Cars.com and Edmunds.com, according to the 2011 Website Performance Tools Report.

The study from J.D. Power and Associates and Compete released Thursday finds 6% of new-vehicle buyers visiting OEM Web sites found their way through Facebook after visiting an automaker's site. This compares with Edmunds.com at 8%, and AOL Autos at 4%.

New-vehicle buyers visit 3.4 automotive websites, on average, during the six months prior to their purchase, according to the study. No surprise that it also identifies google.com as leading nearly one-third of new, vehicle buyers to an OEM or a third-party site visit. Referrals from Google's search engine is notably higher than volume generated by other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo. All other search engines in the study refer less than 10% of new-vehicle buyer traffic to OEM and third-party sites.