Shopping online has become big business and is
one of the fastest growing segments in
the commercial industry. Tracking a customer experience from browsing to check
out provides valuable data for a business. One of the top ranking auto dealers
in the world uses Google Analytics to
help them measure their website
traffic. A case study by Google reports how the
Nissan Motor Company uses the analytic data to gain deeper insights about
consumer’s car preference – about the type, model, and color of car they like the
most. Knowing which cars are most popular helps Nissan make inventory decisions
for their global markets (Google, Inc., 2013) .
A study by the McKinsey
& Company, reports that Americans are rethinking how they buy
cars. “This
is the most dramatic change we've seen in the auto industry and how people buy
cars in the last 50 years," said Hans-Werner Kaas,” senior partner with
McKinsey (LeBeau, 2014) . CNBC Reporter, Phil LeBeau explains that consumers are doing more
research online and less shopping at the dealerships. According to the
McKinsey report, most consumers visit just 1.6 auto dealerships before
purchasing a car, compare that to a decade ago when the average buyer visited, at least, five dealerships. Kaas says that’s
because there is so much more information
and resources online and the auto dealers who can adapt to this new opportunity, will
be the ones who succeed.
One auto dealer that is ahead of the game is the Nissan Motor Company. In doing research for this blog topic, I was pleasantly surprised to find that another IMC student in 2013, Marcie Shanks, had chosen Nissan for her blogpost on e-commerce and web tracking analytics.
Shanks does an excellent job
and details how Nissan has integrated and diversified their use of online technology
and analytics.
From
using Skype, social media platforms, mobile apps, and even gaming technology,
Shanks discovered Nissan collected data, the analytics, from all these sources and
used that information to help improve their website content and make business decisions.
She also found there were a few things that Nissan could do to improve their
website performance. I decided to see if perhaps,
Nissan had implemented any of
the recommendations she made and see if
there were any improvements on their website.
In her research, Shanks found
that the home page, NissanUSA.com, took a while to load, 2.292 seconds to be
exact, that is 38% slower than other websites (Shanks, 2013) . Fast
forward to 2015, using different platforms, I re-tested Nissan’s homepage ranking
and loading speed.
I found that it
loads even slower, drastically slower, between 4.8 to 13.7 seconds (the speed
was different depending on which platform is used and if the test was repeated),
that means 65% to 95% of the world's websites load faster.
You would think that would be a concern. A slow rate of speed could detour your
user, and they could leave the site
before it finishes loading. When Shanks did her research in 2013, the homepage
load speed was 2.292 seconds. What happened? The image slider on the home page
takes forever to load. However,
apparently users don't mind - they either love the pictures and the information
and don't mind waiting.
Would
you agree that when the information is as vital as making a purchasing decision,
especially one as expensive as a car purchase, and comes with an enticing interactive
experience, it is one that is worth waiting for?
Shanks also reported that there
were 93 HTML errors on the home page, I checked the homepage with the W3C Markup Evaluator tool and found 115
errors. To get more insight, I ran the URL on WebPageTest.org site. Nissan received an
F ranking for its images not being compressed, and an F for having cached static
content. I also ran a test on Pingdom.com,
and it confirmed the poor page speed
performance. Pingdom
tools provided recommendations on how to improve Nissan’s website performance.
To improve the download parallelization, Pingdom
recommends that you distribute requests
across multiple hostnames. Currently, there
are 91 parallelizable requests to www.nissanusa.com. Other recommendations included
minimizing redirects, combining external JavaScript, leverage browser caching, and
combining external CSS (Pingdom, 2015) . More information
about these speed rules and how to improve them can be found on Google
Developers PageSpeed Insights.
Google Analytics' explains that their profile setting and custom
reporting allows Nissan
to take complex and timely information from one report view and easily share it
within the organization, saving them time and money.
References
Google. (2012, January). Nissan Motor Company
Gains Insights with Google Analytics E-Commerce. Retrieved from think
with Google:
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/case-studies/nissan-motor-company-gains-deep.html
Google, Inc. (2013). Nissan Motor Company gains
deep insights into users’ product preferences with Google Analytics
e-commerce. Google, Inc. Retrieved from Google Analytics Case Study.
LeBeau, P. (2014, February 26). Americans
rethinking how they buy cars. Retrieved from CNBC:
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/26/americans-rethinking-how-they-buy-cars.html
Pingdom. (2015, December 7). Nissanusa.com Page
Speed Performance. Retrieved from Pingdom:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dxvPAn/nissanusa.com
Shanks, M. (2013, March 4). Nissan uses
Innovative Marketing to Gather Web Analytics . Retrieved from Digital
Marketing Marcie:
http://digitalmarketingmarcie.blogspot.com/2013/03/nissan-uses-innovative-marketing-to.html
Takka, K. (2014, June 21). nissan motor company
leverage web analytics to capture different market operations. Retrieved
from Digital Vidya:
http://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/nissan-motor-company-leverage-web-analytics-to-capture-different-market-operations-dmblog-0604/
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