Turkey Auto Market Intelligence

Dijital yolculuk boyuncadeğer yaratma

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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

8 secs average

visit duration

3.6 pages viewed on

an average visit

2 mins & +26%growth in visits in

last six months

9.9million

17.5million

03

2

015

06

2

015

09

2

015

12

2

015

03

2

016

Traffic growth to Car brand websites Turkey, 12 months

45% left a site after

visiting just one pageSource: All data on this page, eDataXchange


Car brands onlineVisitor 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

4m views 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

https://youtu.be/QnIKS1QsE70


VW Renault Hyundai Toyota Fiat107k 102k 50k 48k 47k

VW Toyota Renault Ford Dacia+23k +14k +12k +10k +9k

726k new cars

registered in Turkey

Car market

20

06

20

07

20

08

20

09

20

10

20

11

20

12

20

13

20

14

20

15

373k

726kTurkish Car Market 2006 - 2015

Sour

ce: T

urki

sh S

tatis

tical

Inst

itute

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 wantThe Turkish market evolves in-line with ‘European’ tastes. Consumer interest moving from traditional ‘3-box’ cars ...

... to hatchbacks and crossovers

Car marketTop 20 Brands 2015 Registrations +/- 20141 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 +/- 20141 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

236visits / registration

(Compared to99 visits / registration European ‘Big 5’)


Part 2

Current themes in automotive digital

marketing

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Current themes in automotive digital marketing

11SOPHUS3-TÜRKİYE FORUMU 2016

Benchmarking digital performanceWhen 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

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IntroductionCompetitive 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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Benchmarking first principlesProviding ‘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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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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Focusing on encroachersEvery 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 quantityAs 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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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

Funn

el E

ngag

emen

t

Audience (Visits)

Figure 4 p Quality versus Quantity

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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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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 developmentsOver 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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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.

ConclusionsBenchmarking, 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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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 eDataXchangeeDataXchange (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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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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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 smallOnce 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:34saverage chat

duration

0m:10saverage wait

for chat tocommence

180chats per

day

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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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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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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!

ConclusionsThe 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.

nA 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

n 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.

nKeep it simple: requesting too much information upfront is an unnecessary barrier to engaging with customers. q

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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

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Device use on car brand sitesUsing 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%

300seconds

1030seconds

298seconds

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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only of sites38%use the latest

‘responsive’ technology

52% of sitesstill maintain parallel

content in an ‘m’ domain

48% of sitestreat tablets identically

to mobile phones

Car Brand Website Device Audit 2015

Summary: what worked, and what didn’t ...

Home page Model pages Configurator

Dealer locatorBrochuredownload

Test drive request

Under the hood

100%worked on all devices






2 fails0 fails

7 fails1 fail

13 fails

3 fails

2 fails0 fails

13 fails1 fail

18 fails

3 fails

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Some things for car brands to considerChange 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 Helpingusersfindmobile-friendlypageshttp://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

http://bit.ly/1xTD7Q0

http://bit.ly/1xTD7Q0

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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 wordSoon 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.

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If you have any questions or comments we would be happy to respond if you email: [email protected]

© 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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Turkey Auto Market Intelligence

Automotive

Transcript of Turkey Auto Market Intelligence