Comments on KAIZEN Analytics: Automotive & Web Analytics in Europe - one year la...

Thanks for this very interesting review Michael. ...

2009-12-03T23:31:16.279+01:00

Thanks for this very interesting review Michael.

Having been in charge of Interactive Marketing for both Renault in Paris and Nissan in Tokyo, I'd really like to highlight the benefits we get from Sophus3's eDX program.

It really answers to the question "Gosh... how well do my competitors perform?". We get a monthly report and analysis for each of our main markets, and that saves us loads of time in managing data, building an Executive Summary, and deciding of taking action.

The tool itself is really user-friendly and tailored for automotive professionals (That's for eDX : I can't comment on eMetrics as we use either Nedstat (Renault)or Omniture (Nissan) -GA is used on a local basis, and is NOT an HQ recommendation-). We can easily extract the information we need at a very operational level (i.e. when we compare the Renault Mégane vs. Toyota Auris).

At last, Sophus3 animates a forum twice a year, with all the eDX participants : Service is key to why we'll keep on doing business with Sophus3.

The most important thing to remember is that, as car manufacturers, we DON'T CARE about the analytics tool! We DO CARE about getting the right information at the right time. We DO CARE about our bosses understanding what our job is about and why they should approuve the decisions we recommend.

In the end, GA could be the best analytics tool in the world, it is absolutely useless if it doesn't help us getting our boss decide of how many millions of Euros we should invest in the Internet.

Sophus3 simply provides the best analytics service for a car manufacturer : expect them to grow continuously for the coming years!

By the way, to clarify thing on my side too – my e...

2009-11-26T23:40:42.182+01:00

By the way, to clarify thing on my side too – my employer do not use eMetrics. Some of our national companies participate in the eDX benchmarking program but it is a local choice.

Michael

@Marcus: Thanks a lot for joining the conversation...

2009-11-26T23:28:40.748+01:00

@Marcus: Thanks a lot for joining the conversation and offering your views as well. I think it clarifies certain points and it will give readers views from the two sides.

I don't think the perfect solution exist - Sophus3 eMetrics services have strengths & weaknesses. Others do as well.

It is just a matter of priorities. It can not be by chances that so many manufacturers have chosen your solution. They probably valued more the expertise & services than other aspects. Others put their priorities elsewhere.

Again, thanks for your contribution.

Michael

@Jonny: Thanks for elaborating your view & opinion...

2009-11-26T23:22:10.204+01:00

@Jonny: Thanks for elaborating your view & opinion. :-)

I think you raise an important point in your "pro's" part: they do understand their customers i.e. the automotive industry. I am not sure that many WA vendors can pretend to have such expertise. Most traditional WA vendors are first selling their solution. Of course, things are changing and many started offering more "services". But they can not pretend to be an expert in all areas. It is not because a vendor has 1 or 2 customers from a specific industry that it means it especially fully understand it.

So based on your comments and Marcus' one, I think that many manufacturers have chosen to favor the services & expertise against features like segmentation, path-analysis, goal tracking.... And possibly find these elsewhere, in another tool like GA (maybe that is one of the reasons of GA penetration). After all it is free :-)

Thanks for your input.

Michael

I feel compelled to join in the debate as a number...

2009-11-26T17:20:02.968+01:00

I feel compelled to join in the debate as a number of things have been stated about sophus3 in this blog. Obviously, we take any comments about sophus3 very seriously. I therefore appreciate Jonny’s input. In response I would like to state the following:
Speed. .....I am never satisfied with any response time above a nanosecond, and so I concur. However, please consider that eMetrics is not a web analytics system. It is a service which is based on business intelligence technology (like SAP). The underlying data warehouse includes a range of online and offline data (eg, advertising expenditure, CSI data, showroom traffic, online buzz, vehicle orders, online surveys data etc...and of course web traffic. The response time is therefore dependent on the complexity of the query that is made.
In our defence - we recently won a major contract where eMetrics was piloted for 6 month next to two major web analytics systems. So, although I freely agree that the system is not the fastest, it seems to be acceptable. However, this does not stop us from continuously working on speeding it up.
Accuracy.....with respect, I would argue that eDX is unique in offering competitive web traffic data within an industry. It tracks the actual traffic from all the participating sites. The alternatives are based on panel or ISP sampling, ie benchmarks are made on the basis of the behaviour of less than 1% of the actual visitors. The average proportion of UV traffic tracked by eDX (as a proportion of total site traffic) is 85%.
eDX is run as a “club”. The members (ie the auto manufacturers) decide what they want to benchmark. It is our job to then ensure that we provide the most objective benchmark by selecting the appropriate pages. You are right that “non-standard” pages are not tracked as by definition they are not comparable. By the way, standard model micro sites are tracked.
Tagging....yes we have chosen an alternative route for tagging. Our clients tend to be large international companies with a huge number of disparate websites hosted in different countries by different suppliers. Our tags are simple and standard. Therefore, our clients are able to minimize their tagging efforts. We are happy to take on the additional work required on our side to ensure that the data is assigned correctly.
ALL configuration has to be done by Sophus3 The users can create their own reports and save them into their own folders. However, as we see ourselves as a service provider we rather than a tool provider, we aim to take on as much of the administrative burden from our clients as possible.
No proper page path analysis: agreed, there are better ones.
No site overlay: Not correct, eMertrics has a site overlay and a heatmap function.
No on-the-fly segmentation: Not correct, eMetrics provides on the fly very detailed segmentation and affinity analysis.
Essentially, eMetrics is primarily designed as a service (ie system + in-depth support) to help auto manufacturers gain very specific information to help auto executives make better sales and marketing decisions. I would welcome any input on improvements that we can make towards this objective.

Just to add, I just expanded this last post into a...

2009-11-26T11:59:19.392+01:00

Just to add, I just expanded this last post into a fuller Review of Sophus3 on my web analytics blog

Yes, I used Sophus3 for a long time and had many p...

2009-11-25T18:33:27.299+01:00

Yes, I used Sophus3 for a long time and had many problems with it. My opinion is completely objective because I no longer have anything to do with the account. However, it's certainly not all bad so I'll start with some positives before moving onto the negatives. And please also remember, these are my opinions alone and have nothing to do with any employer or client I have ever worked with - nor can I say that these are necessarily universal issues that others would have had as well; it's just my experience:

Pros:

> They DO understand the automotive industry better than any other supplier.
> Their customer service is very good (at least for their end clients, not so much if you're an agency).
> Their back end analytics interface, whilst extremely slow, is actually very flexible and feels more like querying a proper database than an OLAP set-up.

Cons:

> Speed. The tool is very slow to use in comparison to other tools, so much so that most of the time you just don't bother. It is more like using Siebel than a web analytics tool.
> Accuracy of the competitive tool. The eData Exchange tool is supposed to provide benchmark data of all automotive suppliers. However, only key pages of the sites are tagged and non-standard stuff like microsites are ignored. This in my opinion makes the data too inaccurate to use.
> Tagging. This does not work like any other web analytics tool. Tags are simply bits of code that are placed on the site - then Sophus3 themselves have to sort out all the meta-data and naming conventions at their end. This is a nightmare and removes vital control over how the tool is set up.
> ALL configuration has to be done by Sophus3. They have to set up all the dashboards, custom metrics etc etc. This wouldn't be so bad, but personally I never really felt that this was done right and therefore wasn't easy to use.
> No proper page path analysis; no site overlay; no on-the-fly segmentation; and various other missing fundamental bits of functionality.

@Jonny Longden: Following the update, I am getting...

2009-11-25T13:31:51.229+01:00

@Jonny Longden: Following the update, I am getting back to your former comment: "The tool is practically unusable in comparison to GA".
I remember that you used to work for Mazda Europe agency - so you have some experience with the tool(that I don't) but that you also wanted to replace it with GA. So, how "objective" is your point of view? :-)

I mean the tool must be not that "bad" as you described it considering that so many manufacturers still stick with it and that even new ones like Peugeot or Citroen switched to it.

Cheers,

Michael

@Marina: thanks for your input. I have updated not...

2009-11-25T13:29:29.052+01:00

@Marina: thanks for your input. I have updated not only the chart & results but also some of my conclusions regarding Sophus3 eMetrics position.

Hello Michael, Peugeot and Citroen are using/dep...

2009-11-20T17:03:28.229+01:00

Hello Michael,

Peugeot and Citroen are using/deploying the Sophus3 solution worldwide (not sure on the exact number of markets though...).

Thanks again for the useful article, it is really interesting to see how our industry is using Webanalytics solutions.

Marina

Talk about a mix up! In fact, I got it wrong about...

2009-11-20T16:27:15.613+01:00

Talk about a mix up! In fact, I got it wrong about Omniture... I should have said only GA & Omniture have increased their shares. But clearly, GA enjoyed a much stronger growth...

Sorry about the mix up :)

BTW, did you look at the growth of "double dipping"? (those using more than 1 tool)

Stéphane

@jonnylongden: thanks for sharing your experience ...

2009-11-20T16:11:29.665+01:00

@jonnylongden: thanks for sharing your experience about Sophus3. Funny to see how your point of view differs from Marina's one :-)
Personally I have never used their full eMetrics solution. I only had the opportunity to use the "eDataXchange" solution but I think it is based on same interface. Didn't find it really user friendly.

@anonymous: I think GA is often offered by media agencies and that the privacy / data ownership aspect is often not mentioned or underestimated. You can opt out and not share your GA data but not sure many think about it.
I agree it is an important aspect - that is why where I work, we used a software version hosted on our side.

@Martina: Thanks for your valuable contribution and input. I think I missed that Peugeot is now using Sophus eMetrics, and not just for eDataXchange. Can you tell me if it is only in France or for whole Peugeot group? So I can update my sheet & stats accordingly.
Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Michael

Having used Weboscope for a few years and just mov...

2009-11-20T15:22:40.201+01:00

Having used Weboscope for a few years and just moved to the Sophus3 tool I have to say it's a much better solution. Sophus3 dashboards are customized for Automotive sites which reduce significantly the time spent in finding the data (+ proper support with real expertise in Auto Sites).

We use GA in parallel for Search Engine Optimization.

Thanks

Marina

Interesting market review. Thanks. I'm not too s...

2009-11-20T11:22:30.666+01:00

Interesting market review. Thanks.

I'm not too sure of my facts here and I don't know whether the auto industry consider this. But when they use GA the data is not theirs. Search data and web analytic data belongs to Google and can be sold to anyone.

Is this true? If it is an the auto industry wakes up to the fact there could be further changes next year.

What's extremely surprising is that Sophus3 are st...

2009-11-20T09:55:55.673+01:00

What's extremely surprising is that Sophus3 are still doing as well as they are. The tool is practically unusable in comparison to GA and the competitive data seriously flawed.

@Stephane: Thanks for commenting. I don't understa...

2009-11-18T11:49:15.826+01:00

@Stephane: Thanks for commenting. I don't understand your point about "Omniture seems to be the only real looser". Actually, their presence is slightly stronger (didn't decrease).

Now the reason (as far I can remember) is that last year, no solution was found on Mercedes-Benz site. Previously there were using Instadia solution - that got bought by Omniture. Maybe last year, there were in a migration/upgrade process.

But Omniture didn't loose customers. Others did...

@anonymous: thanks for the comment. See above about reason for Omniture "increase" vs. last year. And yes, GA is sneaking in all over the place.

I think it somehow reflects an increasing of awareness about the important of Web Analytics - whether to improve SEM activities or simple collect some understanding about what happens on the website. GA clearly contribute to this increase of awareness, make WA more accessible.

Now of course, it doesn't tell much (as I said) about what they do with their tools :)

Michael

You know what I find amazing - thanks for the inte...

2009-11-18T08:51:02.162+01:00

You know what I find amazing - thanks for the intersting report, by the way - is that the two companies which increased their % year over year were Google and Omniture. The only comment is "Omniture seems to be the only real looser".
Interesting bias.

Great work Michael, and thanks for mentioning WASP...

2009-11-18T04:47:27.342+01:00

Great work Michael, and thanks for mentioning WASP!

The growth of Google Analytics is amazing, but as you mentioned, maybe not a big surprise. Omniture seems to be the only real looser (and "others"). What's also interesting is to note the "None found" category drop.

I will also redo my Top 500 US Retail Sites study and I suspect GA will also be stronger in that market.