Turkey Auto Market Intelligence

Dijital yolculuk boyunca
değer yaratma
www.sophus3.com
Auto Market Intelligence Mayıs 2016

2
Introduction
Part 1: Car Brands in Turkey:
the numbers 3
Website performance 4
Social media 6
Car market 7
Headline KPIs 9
Part 2: Current themes in
automotive digital marketing 10
Benchmarking performance 11
Implementing Live Chat 21
Site device audits 26
Bugüne başlarken, “Dijital dünya, kendi
yolculuğunu şekillendirebilmek üzere tüketicilere
güç ve yetki verdi” dedik. Ama aynı zamanda tüm
gün konuştuğumuz gibi, otomobil markaları ve
bayilerini de, tüketicilerin bu yolculuğu boyunca
onlarla daha sık meşgul olabilmelerine ve
bağlantıda kalmalarına imkan sağladı.
Müşteri davranışları hızla değişmektedir ve artık
müşteriler daha fazla online araştırma ve daha
az bayi ziyareti yapma eğilimine girmişlerdir.
Bu yüzden günümüzde markalar otomobil
satış süreçlerinin nasıl geliştiğini yeniden tarif
etmeye başlamaktadırlar. Üstelik, bu süreçlerde
atılan doğru adımlarla yeni araç talebine pozitif
yansımalar olacaktır, zira kampanya ve teşvik
sistemleri yeniden gözden geçirilerek satışı satın
almaktansa talep yaratma ve tüketiciyi motive etme
yoluna gidilmesi elzemdir.
Kısacası gelecekte deneyime dayalı karar
süreçlerinden veri odaklı karar verme süreçlerine
eğilim söz konusu olacaktır. Geliştirilmiş sistem
desteği ve karar alma mekanizmaları ile, sezgi,
önsezi ya da deneyime dayalı ticaret yerine
daha veri odaklı kararlar ile perakende yönetimi
yapılacaktır.
Bir çok müşteri, satın almayla sonuçlanacak yeni
otomobil bakma süreçlerine, diğer bağımsız
internet sitelerine veya bayi sitelerine göz atmadan
önce marka distribütörlerinin internet sitelerinden
başlıyorlar. Bundan böyle hangi model otomobili
alacağını ve bunun için hangi bayileri dolaşması
gerektiğini değerlendirmekte olan müşterilerin
cezbedilmesi için, internette araştırma yaptıkları
süreçte bu müşterilerle bağlantıda kalacak yollar
bularak yeni müşteri davranışlarına adapte
olunacaktır. Bu sanal angajman sürecine giden
yolun temel adımı olarak adlandırabileceğim bilgi
sağlama yolunda ise, Sophus3’ün eDataXchange
aylık raporları ile ölçme ve izleme bağlamında
sektöre önemli bir vizyon kazandırılmış olacaktır,
aynen aylık rutin sektörel ODD raporlarına benzer
olarak...
Otomobil markaları için rekabet mücadelesi
bundan böyle; tüketici beklentileri ve diğer
otomobil markaları ile yakalamaca oynamak
yerine, kendi dijital varlıklarından değer oluşturmak
üzere hengamenin dışında kalmak olacaktır.
Marka distribütörlerinin tüketiciler tarafından
kendi markalarının seçilmesi yolunda kontrolü
ele geçiren ve sonra da bu müşterileri bayileri ile
temas etmeye yönlendiren diğer yenilikçi yolları
da buluyor olacağını hızlanan bir ivmede görüyor
olacağız.
Bildiğimiz her şeyi geride bırakıp, şimdi artık
gerçekten yeni şeyler söylemek, diğerlerinden
farklılaşacak tavır her ne ise hemen şimdi yapmak
zorundayız. Markaların, veriyle hareket etmesini
bilen pazarlama yöneticilerine artık daha da çok
ihtiyacı var ve biz ise onların hepsini bir salonda
topladık bugün. Üstelik, ilgiyle okuyacağınıza emin
olduğum bu AMI (Auto Market Intelligence) raporu,
şimdilik size sunacağımız sadece bir başlangıç
verisidir. Bundan böyle çoğalan katkılarınızla,
seneye çok daha derin bir veri analizi sunuyor
olmaktan mutluluk duyacağız. Görüşmek üzere...
Kurthan Tarakçıoğlu
Yönetici Ortak, sophus3 Türkiye
İstanbul, Mayıs 2016

www.sophus3.com SOPHUS3-TÜRKİYE FORUMU 2016 3
Part 1
Car brands in
Turkey:
the numbers

www.sophus3.com 4SOPHUS3-TÜRKİYE FORUMU 2016
Car brands online
171
million
visits to car
brand sites
in 12 months
8secs
average
visit duration
3.6pages viewed on
an average visit
2mins &
+26%growth in visits in
last six months
9.9
million
17.5
million
032015
062015
092015
122015
032016
Traffic growth to Car brand websites
Turkey, 12 months
45%left a site after
visiting just one page
Source: All data on this page, eDataXchange

Car brands online
Visitor devices
53% 9% 2.4% 3% 1%
171m
visits
100%
Model Pages Configurator Brochure Dealer Test Drive
Request Locator Request
Mobile Tablets PC
49% 2% 49%
Traffic source
39% 29%
8%25%
Search
External site links
Direct entry
Campaign
The ‘funnel’
Source: All data on this page, eDataXchange

Car brands online
M T W T F S S
% weekly traffic
dwell time
02:00 09:00 17:00 22:00
51%
of visits are out of
office hours
326 million
views of car brand
channel hosted
video content
Social media Q1 2016
53 million
interactions*
with car brand
facebook pages
4mviews of Fiat
Egea on YouTube
Q1 2016
https://youtu.be/QnIKS1QsE70
*Interactions are the sum of direct ‘likes’, ‘shares’
and ‘comments’ on a brand’s posts. Source: All data on this page, eDataXchange

VW Renault Hyundai Toyota Fiat
107k 102k 50k 48k 47k
VW Toyota Renault Ford Dacia
+23k +14k +12k +10k +9k
726k
new cars
registered
in Turkey
Car market
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
373k
726k
Turkish Car Market
2006 - 2015
Source:TurkishStatisticalInstitute
Turkish market movers and shakers 2015:
largest volume / largest volume growth:
Source: TSI; EU data - IHS Automotive
6% 6% 7%
16%
21%
24%
European ‘Big 5' Turkey
Growth compared:
The Turkish market offers OEMs
growth. In 2015 Volkswagen, for
example, increased its sales in
Turkey by more than in the UK,
Italy & France combined.
+
+24% 2014

The cars they want
The Turkish market evolves
in-line with ‘European’ tastes.
Consumer interest moving from
traditional ‘3-box’ cars ...
... to hatchbacks and crossovers
Car market
Top 20 Brands 2015
Registrations +/-
2014
1 Volkswagen 107,401 27%
2 Renault 101,746 13%
3 Hyundai 50,131 12%
4 Toyota 47,996 40%
5 Fiat 47,363 20%
6 Ford 47,158 26%
7 Opel 47,000 20%
8 Dacia 37,257 34%
9 BMW 31,221 19%
10 Mercedes 30,333 31%
11 Nissan 26,421 36%
12 Peugeot 22,808 34%
13 Škoda 22,107 52%
14 Audi 20,279 14%
15 Seat 16,911 33%
16 Citroën 16,520 15%
17 Honda 16,278 18%
18 Kia 13,873 26%
19 Volvo 6,939 15%
20 Jeep 3,507 79%
Source: (this page) IHS Automotive
Top 20 Cars 2015
Registrations +/-
2014
1 Fiat Linea 35k 9%
2 Toyota Corolla 35k 49%
3 Renault Fluence 34k 5%
4 Renault Clio 31k 9%
5 Volkswagen Passat 30k 65%
6 Ford Focus 26k 27%
7 Opel Astra 25k 7%
8 Volkswagen Golf 24k 55%
9 Renault Symbol 24k 17%
10 Hyundai i20 22k 11%
11 Volkswagen Polo 22k 9%
12 Volkswagen Jetta 22k 6%
13 Nissan Qashqai 17k 59%
14 Dacia Duster 15k 29%
15 Opel Corsa 13k 7%
16 Hyundai Accent 13k 35%
17 Audi A3 12k 23%
18 Dacia Sandero 12k 51%
19 Peugeot 301 11k 26%
20 Citroen C-Elysee 11k 33%
+51%
+59%
+55%
Source: TSI

Headline KPIs Turkey
171 millionvisits to car brand websites in 12 months
726knew passenger cars registered in 2015
236
visits / registration
(Compared to
99 visits / registration
European ‘Big 5’)

Part 2
Current themes in
automotive digital
marketing

www.sophus3.com
Current themes in automotive
digital marketing
11SOPHUS3-TÜRKİYE FORUMU 2016
Benchmarking
digital
performance
When benchmarking of car brand websites be-
gan more than a decade ago little was known
about the digital automotive audience. Now
the opposite is true. The era of ‘Big Data’ has
meant car brands are swamped with informa-
tion measuring every aspect of their audience’s
behaviour. In this increasingly complex digital
world, benchmarking remains more essential
than ever.
Tania Hodgkinson & Paul Rutishauser

www.sophus3.com
digital marketing
Introduction
Competitive benchmarking is the practice of
comparing the performance of an organisa-
tion with that of its competitors. The purpose
of benchmarking is to understand the areas
where the organisation’s own activities can
be improved.
As ‘digital’ has moved to centre stage in
automotive OEMs marketing activities, the
need to benchmark this activity has become
crucial in providing the wider perspective
for decision makers to assess and evolve
their brand’s actions and priorities.
‘Digital benchmarking’ looks closely at how
the online activities of brands compares, not
just in attracting interest (‘traffic’) but also
in generating engagement and converting
interest into prospective and real customers.
Because of the changing nature of the digital
landscape it is important to understand
that digital benchmarking has moved from
an initial focus on website analytics — al-
though this is still of crucial importance — to
a broader analysis of consumer behaviour
across a multitude of digital platforms. This
includes benchmarking response to activity
in social media, and extends to ambitious
attempts to measure and understand the
brand’s presence within the wider digital
universe: how the brand is perceived and is
talked about online.
For the automotive industry digital bench-
marking is particularly challenging. There are
a large number of brands confined within the
same ‘space’ who generate a great deal of on-
line noise, interest and response. Unlike many
other sectors — where globalisation, mergers
and acquisitions have maybe reduced the
competitive terrain to a handful of significant
‘players’ — the automotive market continues to
support more than 20 significant brands each
selling in excess of 1 million vehicles a year.
eDataXchange (eDX) is a unique initiative to
enable automotive OEMs to benchmark their
digital performance in the context of the wider
digital territory. The participants share data
about their online audience and its activity. In
November 2015, in just one month, eDX provid-
ed data on 0.98 billion website visits, facebook
interactions and Youtube video views to the
digital channels of 28 participating brands
across the ‘Big 5’ European markets. This data
allows the participants to understand their
performance within that crowded terrain and
to more closely judge their ‘real’ performance
within a highly competitive environment.

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digital marketing
Benchmarking first
principles
Providing ‘context’ is the fundamental princi-
ple of benchmarking. A brand’s individual dig-
ital performance when viewed over a period
of time will show countless fluctuations, which
with analysis can be interpreted and mapped
as ‘seasonal’ patterns. Whilst over time a brand
can ‘learn’ these cycles — and where it would
expect traffic levels to be at any particular time
— it is only through comparison with others
that it can judge whether its performance is
good or bad. The example (Figure 1) shows
how these ups and downs in the audience of
one brand invite quite different interpretations
when seen in the context of the market as a
whole.
-20%
-15%
-10%
-5%
0%
5%
10%
15%
Oct-13 Nov-13 Dec-13 Jan-14 Feb-14 Mar-14 Apr-14 May-14 Jun-14 Jul-14 Aug-14 Sep-14
My Car Brand Whole market
k
100 k
200 k
300 k
400 k
500 k
600 k
k
100 k
200 k
300 k
400 k
500 k
600 k
m
2 m
4 m
6 m
8 m
10 m
12 m
14 m
16 m
Figure 1 u
Top Traffic to the website of one (anonymised) UK
car brand over 12 months. January, February and
March appear the ‘strongest’ months.
Middle Overlaying traffic to the individual site on
top of traffic to all car brands shows more clearly
the relative performance.
Bottom Comparing the monthly growth for the
brand with the market average growth reveals that
the brand’s best performance was actually in Au-
gust. Its growth in February — which appeared one
of its strongest months viewed in isolation — was
in reality poor compared to the other brands.

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digital marketing
Focusing on competitors
Comparison of performance against the whole
market provides reassurance or otherwise in
general terms. However, given the breadth of
the automotive market, it clearly makes better
sense for a brand to benchmark itself against
its closest market competitors. Having identi-
fied those other brands from which it wants
to take market share, the starting point has to
be winning audience share — and ensuring
that all digital assets are working effectively to
achieve this.
The example (Figure 2) shows the month-on-
month change in visits to a selected car brand
site in the UK in early 2014. Our subject — an
anonymised ‘premium’ brand — achieved a
13% growth in visits to its site (left section of
graph). This, compared to a growth in traffic
for the whole market of 14%, was a creditable
rather than outstanding performance.
However, when compared to the performance
of its identified rivals — the other premium
and high end brands in the market — then its
position looks less comfortable (central sec-
tion of graph). Two of these competitors both
scored significant gains of 30%, meaning that
during a month of increased traffic our sub-
ject brand effectively lost audience share to
its chief rivals: those very brands from which
it must take customers if it is to improve its
market position.
Focusing on the key competitors means that
in this case the marketing and digital teams
at the OEM are alerted to ‘a problem’ requir-
ing investigation. Part of the explanation of
this apparently weak showing is provided by
the large differentials in the campaign spend
between the brands — with one rival sup-
porting a key model launch with considerable
press and TV advertising. However, structured
benchmarking activity allows the brand to dig
deeper, to look at the performance of different
parts of its model range against those compet-
itors, to gauge the response to its own market-
ing activities, and to question whether there
are elements of its own digital platform that
are underperforming against the competition.
What this example highlights – the necessity
of looking at digital performance in the wider
context – also makes looking at all the KPIs in
one big picture in order to consider their inter-
relation and what actions will provide the best
desired shift in performance.
13.5% 14.4%
36.4%
29.9%
-6.2%
16.2%
14.6%
2.7%
8.2%
v. the market v.‘the Competition’ v.‘Encroachers’Figure 2 u
Identifying Competitors (and ‘en-
croachers’). % change in num-
ber of visits, month-on-month

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digital marketing
Focusing on encroachers
Every brand will be clear as to who are their
key competitors with whom they must compete
with on every possible front. However, analysis
of the traffic flows between car brand web-
sites shows that consumers often do not share
the same narrow perception of the choice of
brands and products available to them. Com-
pelling marketing activity and a range of other
factors — personal recommendations, press
coverage, and ‘buzz’ — can often push some
surprising competitor offerings into an in-mar-
ket car buyer’s ‘consideration list’. At different
times therefore a car brand will find unlikely
competitors attracting the attention of its own
site visitors: often on the back of new and inno-
vative product offerings. The premium brand
in our example sees a lot of ‘encroaching’ cross
site traffic not only with two of the larger ‘vol-
ume’ manufacturers but with one brand that
would be seen as offering a ‘budget’ proposi-
tion. Tactics to limit or reverse that flow — by
gaining and cementing the interest of aspira-
tional buyers — need to understand and target
those very specific consumer journeys. Bench-
marking this shifting cross-site traffic means
that the correct ‘encroachers’ are identified
and their appeal understood.
For brands with large product ranges this
encroachment effect is often most significant
at model level, maybe where new customer
segments are being targeted with new mod-
els. For example, premium brands launching
smaller, ‘entry level’ products can be seen to
be encroaching into the audience of volume
brands, whilst ‘budget’ brands make inroads in
the other direction with a spate of products en-
croaching into what was previously perceived
as the ‘high-end’ SUV segment.
Benchmarking quality not
quantity
As we have seen, the benchmarking of visitor
numbers to different digital platforms can
provide a useful ‘broad brush’ understanding
of a car brand’s competitive performance.
However, in a digital context, a focus on ‘vol-
ume’ is of only limited usefulness. The graph
of daily traffic (Figure 3) illustrates one of the
major problems of using the visitor numbers
as a solitary metric of digital success. It shows
the number of visits for three closely compet-
ing brands over the course of one month in
the French market. As can be seen, two of the
brands attract large ‘one off’ spikes of traffic
during this timeframe — in the case of ‘Brand
1’ it receives a surge of traffic on the 26th of the
month which is more than five times the daily
average for the rest of the month. Such spikes
0
20,000
40,000
60,000
80,000
100,000
120,000
140,000
160,000
180,000
200,000
01/ 02/ 03/ 04/ 05/ 06/ 07/ 08/ 09/ 10/ 11/ 12/ 13/ 14/ 15/ 16/ 17/ 18/ 19/ 20/ 21/ 22/ 23/ 24/ 25/ 26/ 27/ 28/ 29/ 30/
Brand 1 Brand 2 Brand 3
Figure 3 q The problem of ‘noise’: typical daily traffic spikes.

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digital marketing
are not uncommon and can have many differ-
ent causes — they may be the result of a highly
concentrated banner or search campaign, or
generated by a single piece of video or other
content that suddenly goes ‘viral’. Yet we can
see that the impact is only short lived: in the
case of ‘Brand 1’ there is a brief ‘after-shock’ of
increased traffic which fizzles out within just
four days.
Whilst such spikes of interest may represent
a positive result for ‘brand awareness’ activ-
ities, they can actually conceal what is really
happening to the online audience’s perception
of the brand and their engagement with and
interest in its products. Benchmarking analysis
needs to find additional metrics that address
this ‘signal to noise’ problem.
Effective benchmarking strategies therefore
try to identify the crucially important subset of
the online audience who may be in the market
for a new car, and to see whether their various
digital assets are engaging and retaining that
relatively small audience’s interest.
Filtering out ‘noise’ to find that engaged audi-
ence can be achieved by first of all looking at
the locus of visitor activity. The engagement
‘funnel’ for a new car buyer is likely to include
a concentration of activity around specific
touch points on the website: research and
immersion within model information pages;
use of vehicle configurators to explore person-
alised pricing and equipment choices; down-
loading or requesting vehicle brochures and
price lists; entering location information to
identify a dealership or request a test drive.
Tracking visitors’ progress along this virtual
funnel, and benchmarking the success of the
site in attracting and retaining those visitors
within it, provides an immediately more use-
ful comparison of performance than overall
visitor numbers, and exposes any critical
shortcomings.
In this next example (Figure 4) the graph
maps each car brand in the market-place
according to two metrics. Along the horizon-
tal axis are shown the absolute number of
monthly visits: the further to the right the
brand is positioned, the greater the size of its
audience. The vertical axis shows each brand’s
‘funnel engagement’ (a value derived on the
weighted average of visits to the model pages,
configurator, brochure request and test drive
request sections of the site relative to the mar-
ket as a whole). The ‘higher’ the brand appears,
the more it has engaged interest. As can be
seen, ‘My Car Brand’, despite having a smaller
overall audience, performs strongly in terms
of attracting and retaining visitors in those
critical areas of its site. By contrast, the ‘Most
visited brand’ is clearly successful in drawing
in visitors, but performs weakly – in fact below
the market average – in maintaining their in-
terest in those touch points. ‘Bigger’ in this case
does not necessarily mean ‘better’.
My Car Brand
Most visited brand
FunnelEngagement
Audience (Visits)
Figure 4 p Quality versus Quantity

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digital marketing
For OEMs, gaining more audience within a
competitive market is much harder and rela-
tively more expensive than optimizing their
online performance to improve the conversion
of a higher proportion into customers. Scoring
well in such engagement metrics is therefore
particularly important for smaller brands
without the budget to allow a more ‘scatter
gun’ approach to attracting large numbers of
visitors.
To see why they perform better or worse in
terms of funnel engagement a brand can de-
construct and compare their performance over
time for each individual engagement point.
Figure 5 is a simple dashboard which separates
out the different points along the engagement
funnel, and benchmarks the performance of
one brand against its identified competitors
as well as the market as a whole. It shows the
percentage of overall site visits which result
in visits to these critical sections. Two things
are immediately obvious: the small size of this
engaged audience within the overall number
of site visitors, and the huge variation in the
capability of sites to attract visitors to these
critical areas. In this example, ‘My Car Brand’
performs very strongly in getting traffic into its
test drive request section, but performs poorly
in attracting visitors to its brochure request
area or into using the dealer locator functions.
Again, this should send an alert to the brand’s
digital team to investigate why this might be
the case. At this level — benchmarking just the
frequency of contact with these touch points,
rather than attrition/completion rates follow-
ing on from that contact — an examination
of the visibility of this functionality would be
in order. This means not just the superficial
‘visual prominence’ of these sections within
the site’s navigational architecture, but where
and how these choices are offered to the visitor
during a perceived ‘customer journey’. Com-
paring the site with the ‘best-in-class’ perform-
ers to assess differences in proactiveness, as
well as in design, would be a sensible first step
in that investigation.
The second way of reducing ‘noise’ so as to
identify engaged visitors is to look at their
own individual behaviour patterns across the
site as a whole. Visitors on a single page of a
site effectively look the same: the anonymous,
distant ‘agitator’ of a JavaScript tag. Howev-
er, as they move across a site, the number of
locations they visit, the time spent on each, and
the frequency with which they return to the
2.7%
3.6%
4.2%
Brochure request
'My Car Brand' 'the Competition' Whole market
43% 44%
49%
Model Page
17%
16%
13%
Configurator
5.5%
8.2%
7.5%
Dealer locator
1.4%
0.5%
1.0%
Test drive request
Figure 5q
The engagement funnel: % of all site visits to each ‘touch point’

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digital marketing
site, all combine to give a better understanding
of their relative level of interest in and engage-
ment with the brand.
If we pause briefly on the metaphor of each
brand’s site being a funnel — all be it, an
increasingly misshapen one, through which
visitors move in often random and unpredicta-
ble ways — then it is clear from the site section
data in Figure 5 that there are two very distinct
parts to that funnel. In the ‘upstream’ part it
seems that OEMs have, particularly in recent
years, become extremely adept at drawing
large numbers of visitors to their model pages
and even vehicle configurators. However,
downstream from this we can see that pages
requiring interaction and form filling often re-
duce the conversion rates to these destinations
to a single digit percentage. ‘Engagement’ it
appears dwindles at these points with interac-
tion shifting offline, and the decision making
process moving to other means: consultation
with friends and family perhaps or visits to
dealerships. The aim going forward will be
for more integration between OEM and dealer
systems to blend continuing online contact
with the brand as the offline dialogue evolves.
Digital benchmarking will elucidate which
brands get to that point first.
Benchmarking: future
developments
Over more than a decade automotive OEMs
have benefited from increasingly detailed,
daily measurement and benchmarking of their
sites through the eDataXchange project. This
has allowed them to compare automotive site
user behaviour in a like-for-like manner. The
measurement of that behaviour has grown
steadily more sophisticated, extending beyond
counting site and model visits to tracking re-
turning visitor rates, dwell time, and the depth
of visit to key site sections.
This benchmarking project has clearly been
ahead of its time in tracking all visitors and not
just sampling and extrapolating numbers. In
its scope and purpose the project adopted early
on the techniques and methods of ‘Big Data’
before that term entered the analytical lexi-
con. For years now, eDX has been collecting,
storing and analysing petabytes of data that
show the nuances of billions of visits made to
car sites. This shows OEMs clear market trends
and allows them to accurately pinpoint their
position and performance within that shifting
landscape.
The development of analytic methods created a
significant level of objectivity and allowed on-
line performance to be measured and judged:
a good thing in an age where technology and
customer interaction channels are evolving at
such a rapid pace.

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digital marketing
But in some ways ‘Big Data’ has become a
methodological ‘norm’ largely because the
technology now exists — at greatly reduced
cost — to enable the collection and processing
of vast quantities of data. As a result, the quan-
tity and complexity of reporting have explod-
ed. In eDX, although there has always been an
online interface through which OEMs can get
data for analysis themselves, we started ‘push-
ing’ summarised market reports over 5 years
ago because OEMs simply did not have the time
or resources to get it themselves from yet ‘an-
other system’. The complexity of that reporting
has evolved at a similar pace to the increas-
ing complexity of analytics and the processes
underpinning it. But we wonder whether too
much reporting is burying innovative decision
making under the weight of too much detail
whilst losing perspective of the whole?
Our ongoing dialogue with OEMs in all mar-
kets, with both national and central digital,
marketing and CRM departments, has led us to
question the continual layering of more report-
ing and more data because we fundamentally
believe the purpose of benchmarking to be
about emergence and not reduction. It should
arm each digital stakeholder with a high level
perspective enabling them to apply their own
business acumen and innovative thinking to
decide where to focus their attention, and lim-
ited resources, to optimize performance, gain
competitive edge or close a gap.
In addition we are aware of the explosion in
social media activity within the digital jour-
ney. Social media extends online interest in
car brands to a new audience, often with little
overlap with their website audience and with,
sometimes, greater levels of engagement. All
this activity generates yet more data and fur-
ther increases the danger of it becoming a hin-
drance to innovative business decision making.
It is clear that the role of benchmarking must
expand to take in the entire digital ecosystem
and help OEMs pinpoint their position and
performance within it.
Rather than ‘lean analytics’, we believe eDX
should deliver lean reporting using the full ex-
tent of analytical power and insight to enable
OEM decision makers to immediately grasp
their position within the customer journey
‘map’: to see their own performance in relation
to the market average, their competitors, and
the best-in-class. Benchmarking should enable
them to determine where they need to ‘zoom
in’ for the greatest impact.
With that in mind, eDX is focussing reporting
much more strongly around visual balance, not
just numbers, when providing a digital perfor-
mance perspective.
We envisage our benchmarking services de-
veloping over the coming months to provide a
high altitude map of the whole digital ecosys-
tem. We have widened our perspective to track
audience and behaviour across car brand’s
social media assets. We will increasingly look
at the digital customer journey from traffic
source to converted online leads. In addition,
we will tailor and extend our reporting to
support decision making by a wider group of
digital stakeholders — in marketing, CRM,
or brand management — in the format and
at a frequency they most need. The aim is
to deliver what we describe as an ‘holistic’
benchmarking perspective: one that takes in
and makes sense of all of the brand’s digital
platforms across all stages of the online cus-
tomer journey.
Conclusions
Benchmarking, we believe, should be at the
centre of digital strategy, driving the search
for constant improvement by measuring suc-
cess, and failure, against the performance of
the market as a whole and the most relevant
competitors in particular.
Benchmarking should create a condition of
permanent discomfort, a restlessness to wring
out the tiniest improvement from every ele-
ment of a brand’s digital operations.
At a practical level what is chosen to measure,
and whom that measurement is performed
against, should be selected with the intention
of providing the maximum illumination of
performance, and be as merciless in exposing
shortcomings as it is effective in highlighting
success. This all adds up to a culture very
different from the complacency that an ex-

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digital marketing
clusively inward looking approach inevitably
propagates: the view that ‘everything in my
garden is lovely’.
Benchmarking need not be complex, indeed
the end point is to achieve clarity and simplic-
ity, utilising KPIs and dashboards that have
been stringently tested but are simple and in-
tuitive to understand. Such information is then
capable of being shared and understood more
widely within the organisation, inviting partici-
pation in a continuous cycle of improvement.
The focus of benchmarking is always on action
and reaction: but the final outcome will depend
on those using it being both empowered and
dexterous enough to exploit the insights it
reveals. n
About eDataXchange
eDataXchange (eDX) is a benchmarking project
which includes all the major automotive OEMs
and which began in 2002. Each participating
brand can see data about the performance of its
own digital assets and see comparable data for
all of the other participants.
The data is served through a customisable
online dashboard/ analytical system, and the
service further supported by a range of manage-
ment reports and consultancy services to build
additional insights upon the raw data.
A key aspect of the project has been to propose
a common ‘model’ for automotive websites: a
schematic of site sections and functionality that
ensures that each website is understood and
tracked in the same way. This model is built
on a clear understanding of the automotive
consumer’s ‘surf and research’ behaviour so that
it focuses on the most critical areas of online
activity.
This model ensures that participants are truly
able to compare ‘apples-with-apples’ — i.e. the
data about traffic to the subset of pages on their
own website is equivalent to the data they can
see for their competitors. (This approach also
explains why the ‘headline’ figures of bench-
marked traffic will vary from the traffic totals
generated by a brand’s own analytics systems,
which will track activity on a larger number of
site pages.) It also enables comparison between
sites that may differ considerably in terms of their
size, structure and technical sophistication.
The success of the project owes much to the
specificity of the solutions it offers: the conceptual
approach to monitoring digital activity has been
constructed around a clear understanding of
both the way consumers interact with car brands
online, as well as the needs of those brands
to maximise the effectiveness of their digital
platforms. Those capabilities are the result of the
participation of the automotive OEMs in defining
the project’s initial objectives, and their ongoing
involvement and feedback through user forums
and clinics.
The implementation of this benchmarking ca-
pability is, perhaps surprisingly straightforward.
JavaScript ‘tags’ (lines of code) are embedded
within site sections and pages following the model
described. Generally, the simple standard tag can
be implemented through the site’s content man-
agement system or through a container tag man-
agement system meaning deployment requires
little effort and can be executed rapidly.
The success of the model has meant that sophus3
has been asked to implement similar benchmark-
ing initiatives in other sectors — most notably
the newspaper, asset management and airline
industries. o

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digital marketing
Implementing
‘Live Chat’
Jochen Coelsch, Director of CRM at Ford-
Werke GmbH, shares some insights from the
brand’s roll out of online chat.

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digital marketing
Live Chat is a small, yet important channel
when it comes to Customer Engagement in
today’s digital world: you’ve got social media
platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, cus-
tomer reviews, blogs and forums – so plenty of
opportunity to engage with an online audience.
One of the biggest changes that has impacted
all of us in the automotive industry is that we
used to work in separate ‘chimneys’ – vehicle
sales, the credit organisation, after sales etc. all
part of the same organisation, but each dealing
with a single customer on a separate basis –
and the fact is that our customers simply didn’t
care. They want to talk to Ford, and they want
to be recognised as one customer across all
of these different silos, channels, systems and
formats.
It is no longer about merely satisfying custom-
ers – it is about truly engaging with them and
building a rapport. To do this, we are not clos-
ing existing channels – telephone, conventional
mail, emails – but are opening new ones in
order to meet their requirements. Our ongoing
challenge is how to position ourselves within
these new channels, and ensure our customers
are served properly in a way that ensures they
stay loyal to the brand (Ford). If we don’t do
it right we create dissatisfied customers and
potentially lose them – they simply look around
at our competitors’ websites and purchase
elsewhere.
Start small
Once we decided to implement Live Chat, our
considered approach was to start small. We ran
a pilot in France where we had tagged the ford.
fr website pages, and, with the buy-in of our
marketing colleagues, we used our Customer
Relationship Centre for fulfillment. Using our
knowledgeable advisors, and with Sophus3 as
our software partner, we started to monitor the
results and understand what was going on: the
topics our customers were interested in, why
they wanted to chat, and learn what we had to
do in order to satisfy their needs.
Today we are offering the channel on a per-
manent basis in five of the major markets, i.e.
France, the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy, via
the national web portals – as well as having
used the channel tactically on microsites to
support special events such as the Mustang
pre-launch during the UEFA Champions League
final in Madrid last year.
Live chat stats.
8m:34s
average chat
duration
0m:10s
average wait
for chat to
commence
180
chats per
day

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digital marketing
A key challenge to successful imple-
mentation is predicting levels of traffic
and ensuring that there are the right
number of advisors available to meet
the demand for interaction from cus-
tomers. u
t The visibility of the ‘invitation to chat'
button can be controlled depending on
the availability of an advisor to service a
request it could generate.

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digital marketing
So where are we currently? On average we are
generating roughly 180 chats per day – small
numbers for the time being. But what we see
is cross-channel activity, with customers who
go on to use the traditional Call Centres and
also social media platforms. Our research also
shows how these activities are all inter-relat-
ed and how, as we extend the reach through
digital activities, the more we need to actively
manage these interactions from under one
umbrella.
When a customer or prospect is conducting a
chat they are presented with the opportunity
to provide feedback about their experience by
using a survey. We ask them how satisfied they
are with the service they have received from
the Live Chat advisor. What is evident is that
our audience really likes it, with 15% of cus-
tomers spontaneously completing the question-
naire, and rating the service as four stars or
more in terms of their overall satisfaction, and
close to five stars for the attitude and courtesy
of the advisor they interacted with.
We also monitor – which is vital if you want
to provide a good service – whether there are
chats that we have missed, so opportunities to
engage with prospects or customers that we
have lost altogether.
In the UK we found that the average chat lasts
for more than 8 minutes – this is quite a long
period when compared with the much shorter
dwell time of the average visitor to a car brand
website [around 3 minutes a visit in 2014].
Also extremely important is the customer
waiting time. Once a prospect or customer has
chosen to chat, you will only frustrate them if
you are unable to reply swiftly. The ‘numbers’
(see next page) show how we started, and the
capacity we have to respond to the incoming
chat volume (demand and supply).
The pilots have been a useful test to build on
best practice. Firstly, we have found it is impor-
tant to match channel availability to channel
resources. At the moment we are not in a pro-
active mode, we are offering only reactive chat,p Keeping it simple: requesting too much
information up front is an unnecessary
barrier to engaging with customers
through a text chat.

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digital marketing
so when we don’t have the capacity to respond
we simply do not show the ‘button’ so as to
avoid customer frustration.
Requesting too much customer information up-
front is a barrier to customer engagement. We
request only a name from the customer so we
know who we are talking to. The key message
here is to keep it very simple for the customer.
We did try a ‘Leave a message’ facility in cases
where we did not have enough capacity – but
we found this didn’t work. People who want
to chat don’t want to wait and this frustrates
them.
Capacity utilisation is really the tricky part –
matching resources to web traffic so that the
advisors are there when the prospects and
customers are. This is complex, and of course,
this is what determines a large percentage of
the overall cost. We did a lot of work on mod-
elling usage so that we now can tailor staffing
according to the web traffic we can see online
and according to demand.
Currently we don’t operate 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, but we can see from the
pattern of our web traffic – with activity of
increasing significance after business hours –
that we have to extend our availability or work
in shifts. Of course with Live Chat, you don’t
necessarily have to work from an office, you
can work from home.
Advisors handling the chats need to be com-
petent. Customers invoke a chat because they
want more information, so the advisor has to
know more than the customer, and more in
many cases than the information online that
the customer has already been provided with.
Training is therefore paramount – and, if addi-
tional pages (content) are added to the channel,
the advisors must be trained in advance!
Conclusions
The potential is there to expand and launch
Live Chat in more markets. The challenge is to
find synergies in our responses across channels
so it is as cost-effective as possible. You cannot
simply go on adding channels and cost to your
operation, and you must look at efficiencies
as you move to the next level and increase the
volume of users.
„„ A key challenge to successful implementation
is analysing levels of web traffic and
ensuring that the right number of advisors
are available to meet the demand for
interactions
„„ The Live Chat button can be controlled, so
depending on the availability of the advisors
to service requests, the button may or may
not be visible.
„„ Keep it simple: requesting too much
information upfront is an unnecessary
barrier to engaging with customers. q

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digital marketing
Car brand
website device
audit - fit for
purpose?
Two years ago sophus3 undertook an audit of
car brand websites to test how well they per-
formed when viewed through a mobile device.
A follow up audit conducted last summer
found that many automotive sites have still not
come to terms with the fact that the majority
of visits now take place on what were thought
of as ‘non-standard’ devices.
Paul Rutishauser

www.sophus3.com
digital marketing
Device use on car brand
sites
Using data collected through the eDataXchange
project the latest audit of device use revealed
the following:
1. Since the first quarter of 2015 the majority
of site visits to UK and other European car
brand sites now take place on a mobile
device, either a phone (31%) or tablet (20%).
Visits on conventional PCs are now in the
minority (49%)
2. The visitor on a tablet spends over three
times as long viewing content as a visitor
using either a smartphone or PC. Users of
tablets are perhaps more predisposed for
an ‘immersive’ experience – yet many sites
continue to serve truncated content and low
resolution images to these popular devices.
3. The audit found the number of people who
are ‘coming back for more’ is relatively
higher amongst mobile and tablet users with
a greater percentage of return visits from
these devices.
Using a range of devices to test 21 different car
brand sites across the European ‘Big 5 mar-
kets’, many shortcomings were identified.
1. Model pages, the prime destination for site
visitors, often work poorly on devices other
than PCs giving a ‘second rate’ experience
on tablet devices.
2. Key functionality such as the vehicle
configurator is often unavailable or fails on
mobile and tablet devices. Only one brand
had a vehicle configurator that worked
robustly across all devices.
3. Dealer locator pages on the whole worked
effectively, but no brand is using geolocation
technology to proactively approach site
visitors according to where they are.
4. Contact forms for brochures and test drive
requests were in many cases needlessly
lengthy and difficult to complete on devices
without keyboards.
5. Many sites still offer downloadable
brochures in ‘print format’ presenting the
user of a 5cm wide cell phone screen with a
facsimile of a document designed to be over
half a metre wide when printed.
The table overleaf summarises the findings
of what did and didn’t work on the 21 sites we
tested.
31% 20% 49%
300
seconds
1030
seconds
298
seconds
Figure 1p
The ‘Tipping Point’: in many markets the majority
of visits now happen on a mobile device.
Figure 2q
Dwell time by different devices. Tablet users are
the most leisurely browsers.

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digital marketing
only of sites38%use the latest
‘responsive’ technology
52%of sites
still maintain parallel
content in an ‘m’ domain
48%of sites
treat tablets identically
to mobile phones
Car Brand Website Device Audit 2015
Summary: what worked, and what didn’t ...
Home page Model pages Conﬁgurator
Dealer locator Brochure
download
Test drive request
Under the hood
100%
worked on all devices
81%
5%
90%
38%
86%
2 fails0 fails
7 fails1 fail
13 fails
3 fails
2 fails0 fails
13 fails1 fail
18 fails
3 fails
www.sophus3.com

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digital marketing
Some things for car
brands to consider
Change is here to stay – the device shift will
tip further
The device shift we have tracked on car brand
sites over the last two years will continue.
This is supported by the shipment data for
device types quoted earlier. Making sure that
a brand’s digital assets work across any and all
devices is a growing imperative in the highly
competitive automotive market.
Are some brands losing out as consumer de-
vice preferences shift?
We saw quite large variations in ‘device split’
recorded on different websites where brands
are offering similar products to the same mar-
ket segment. Brands should review their traffic
by device for each area of their site and ask
if there are any design and technology issues
causing them to lose out as consumers’ device
preferences change? Are brands benchmarking
their campaigns, traffic, funnel attrition, etc. in
a way that is device sensitive?
Changing mindsets
A question for car brand web managers: do
you, your staff and your agency regularly
review and monitor your own site primarily
through a mobile device? Why not try keeping
your laptop shut for a week when accessing the
web? Accessing your site in the same way that
it is now primarily accessed – through a tablet
or cellphone – may shift your thinking in a
number of areas.
Test, test test
Testing using a range of ‘real’ devices – not
agent switchers – is crucial to maximising the
effectiveness of all digital platforms. Many site
designers are still not thinking about how func-
tionality may vary across devices. For example,
during the audit we found many examples of
‘hover over’ states that bring up explanatory
flyouts or other important information on a PC
but which do not function on touch screen de-
vices meaning that such information is hidden.
How a website works and, sometimes critical
shortcomings, are not apparent until you test
with a real finger on a real touchscreen.
Mobile friendly according to Google
One of the recent drivers for car brands to
urgently review the user experience on mobile
and other devices was the announcement by
Google in a 2014 blog post1
that it would be
changing the way it ranked search results to
take account of how ‘mobile friendly’ the listed
sites were. Quickly dubbed as ‘mobilegeddon’
– at least by those in the search engine opti-
misation industry – the changes introduced in
March 2015 threatened to crash companies out
of search results if they failed to adapt their
sites in time. Google provided documentation
1 Helping users find mobile-friendly pages http://bit.
ly/1xTD7Q0
of the changes that were necessary as well as a
handy test page2
for brands to have their efforts
marked by Google robots.
As part of our audit of sites we ran all of the
URLs through the checker. All but one site
passed. No doubt much energy was used in nu-
merous companies to ‘pass’ the Google test and
make the design and coding changes insisted
upon. What however is obvious from our own
audit and the many problems it uncovered,
is that receiving the message “Awesome! This
page is mobile-friendly” from the Google test
page does not provide a great deal of assurance
as to a site’s real-world cross-device capabili-
ties.
Technology platforms
A strategic issue many brands are grappling
with is what is the best web platform to service
the demand of this vast and growing array of
devices? A minority of the sites we tested –
eight – were running on what appear to be the
‘latest’ responsive web platforms. Responsive
design creates a ‘single’ site to support differ-
ent devices using breakpoints – based on the
width of the browser – to determine how the
layout of a site will appear and change across
different devices.
Generally these sites lived up to the promise of
the technology and recorded fewer ‘fails’ with
content and functionality looking good and
performing effectively across our test devices.
2 http://bit.ly/1EVi9R3

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digital marketing
Yet brands are understandably hesitant about
moving to these new technologies: the cost to
rebuild hundreds of sites and repurpose their
content across multiple markets is obviously
large. (And all too often this kind of ‘next big
thing’ turns into a huge and never ending dis-
traction from the mundanities of selling more
cars.)
However as we could see from the audit, the
alternative is probably worse. 11 of the sites we
surveyed were serving parallel content from
an ‘m.’ subdomain. In some cases this content
was clearly being retrieved from the same as-
set repository as the ‘desktop site’, but in others
these subdomains seemed to be supported by
duplicate content management activity. Many
of these m. subdomains had an abandoned feel
with out-of-date content. The test drive request
page on one of the m. domains we visited had
an incomplete list of model choices with the
brand’s newest offering – on which it has just
spent several million euros for the pan-Europe-
an launch campaign – noticeably missing.
The tablet quandary
Brands are still clearly unsure about how to
deal with this newer family of devices. At the
moment the majority (10 sites) offer the same,
often truncated content as they serve to a cell
phone. But three others offer the tablet the
same content as a PC. (The responsive sites
of course offer ‘the same only different’ to
everybody). Certainly tablet users are poor-
ly served. It was on this test platform that
we recorded some of the worst fails, whilst
nearly all content served to tablets from an m.
subdomain had a ‘low rent’ feel (grainy images
and stretched navigation buttons). The data
on tablet dwell time, and the other character-
istics of tablet use that we have reported on
elsewhere (for example the evidence that they
are frequently used for ‘late night, languorous
browsing’) suggest that the majority of brands
have currently got this wrong?
Aesthetics and brand
From the first years of the ‘graphic web’ most
car brands have evolved an online corporate
identity and house style from the elements they
previously used offline. Much of this activity
has been about form and ‘glossiness’, transfer-
ring the high production values of a printed
brochure onto their digital offerings.
However, particularly when scaled down to
the tiny display size of a cell phone, many of
these signifiers of elegance and quality cease
to work, and are actually counterproductive
to creating a good ‘brand experience’. Many
of the sites we surveyed were hampered by
their house styles: reliance on large areas of
dark tones for a dramatic ‘premium’ effect, and
using reversed out text for navigation items.
As a reviewer summarised “on a small device
this style of site design gives a feeling akin to
blundering around in a poorly lit room trying
to find the light switch.”
Automotive companies need to remember
that ‘brand’ is more than slavishly following
a graphic style guide: it is about a poise and
attitude expressed in countless ways that need
to adapt as circumstances change. A handful
of car brands have recognised this and uncer-
emoniously ditched central aspects of their
previous visual identities to fit the digital age.
Perhaps more need to be thinking that way?
Final word
Soon the majority of visitors to most car brand
sites will be utilising mobile devices. Car
brands therefore need to move from a mindset
of ‘accommodating’ these devices to affording
them primacy. Our audit suggests that while
things have improved since we reviewed this
subject two years ago, many brands still fail
to escape a ‘PC centric’ mindset and need to
review their maturity in this area.
Many sites are still not ‘fit for purpose’ in
critical areas – most notably in allowing a con-
sumer to simply configure their vehicle choice,
speedily access a readable brochure, or quickly
initiate a request to a dealer.
There is much work still to be done to meet
these challenges, but what is clear is that
brands who are first in meeting consumers’ ex-
pectations on their preferred devices will enjoy
a considerable competitive advantage. n

31
Sophus3 is at the forefront of designing and
applying technology and processes that mon-
itor consumer behavior in the online sector.
Our key strength lies in our ability to identify
and gather the right data and information,
combined with advanced and objective anal-
ysis. We provide expert services and support
to companies in areas where they don’t
always have in-house expertise.
eDataXchange (eDX) is a strategic sector
and country collaborative project that moni-
tors consumer behaviour across websites. It
acts as a digital GPS of a car brand’s position
in the market place and enables participants
to set targets, determine which digital invest-
ments are changing their market position
and how.
Auto Market Intelligence (AMI) is so-
phus3’s quarterly journal of ideas and
analysis aimed at e-business professionals
working in, or supporting, the automotive
sector. The journal focuses on innovation
and developments that are impacting the
sector, as well as providing a detailed review
of on-going brand performance.
www.sophus3.com
If you have any questions or comments we
would be happy to respond if you email:
info.turkey@sophus3.com
© Copyright 2016 sophus3 ltd. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in
any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,
including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher.
Published by: sophus3 ltd. Registered Office: Fairmile,
Silwood Close, Ascot, Berkshire, SL5 7DX, UK, Registra-
tion Number: 432136

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