Web Analytics Vendor Review – Sophus3
November 26th, 2009 | 
Author: Recently I read Michael Notte’s excellent post on web analytics and the automotive industry in Europe, and then ended up getting drawn into a conversation about the tool Sophus3, which I used for a long time when I was working with a key automotive manufacturer. I ended up writing a bit of a review for it, so thought I would expand this out a bit on my own blog. I had a lot of problems with this tool and never really felt able to voice my issues about it due to client politics, but now I no longer work with this client I feel it is time my opinions were voiced. Hopefully this will assist with other client’s decision making processes.
Firstly, a disclaimer: these are my opinions alone and have nothing to do with any employer or client I have ever worked with – nor can I say that these are necessarily universal truths that others would have had as well; it’s simply a statement of my experiences working with the tool and supplier. Similarly, the client in question has an excellent relationship with Sophus3 and does get value from the tool; my beef is simply that they could do a hell of lot better and don’t realise it.
Furthermore, it really isn’t all bad – so just to avoid coming across too negative I will start with the positives:
Pros:
- They DO understand the automotive industry better than any other supplier. No other vendor targets vertical market segements in this way. It means that they have a lot of good insights on how the measurement framework for the sector should work and how reporting should be built.
- Their customer service is very good and their staff are very dedicated to client support (at least for their end clients, not so much if you’re an agency though).
- Their back end analytics interface, whilst extremely slow, is actually very flexible and feels more like querying a proper database than an OLAP set-up. Complex cross-tabs and tables can be built in a way which isn’t really possible in other tools.
Cons:
- Speed. The tool is very very slow to use in comparison to other tools, so much so that most of the time you just won’t bother. At times it is more like querying a huge SQL database than a web analytics tool.
- Accuracy of the competitive tool. The eData Exchange tool is supposed to provide benchmark data of all automotive suppliers. However, only key pages of the sites are tagged and non-standard stuff like microsites are ignored. This in my opinion makes the data too inaccurate to use. Some manufacturers rely heavily on campaign microsites and the customer never actually hits the main website. Other manufacturers do everything in the main site.
- Tagging. This does not work like any other web analytics tool. Tags are simply bits of code that are placed on the site – then Sophus3 themselves have to sort out all the meta-data and naming conventions at their end. This is a nightmare and removes vital control over how the tool is set up. It also creates a enormous possibilty for error that just doesn’t happen in other tools.
- ALL configuration has to be done by Sophus3. They have to set up all the dashboards, custom metrics etc etc. This wouldn’t be so bad, but personally I never really felt that this was done right and therefore wasn’t easy to use. No vendor, despite what they say, really has a proper handle on measurement strategy. This is something that needs to be handled by either the client or the agency; and they need the hands-on flexibilty to make the tool bend to this strategy.
- No proper page path analysis; no site overlay; no on-the-fly segmentation; and various other missing fundamental bits of functionality.
In summary, at this point in time I can honestly say that I would not recommend Sophus3 to any company, not even automotive manufacturers. The tool isn’t completely useless, but the point is that even free tools like GA are leaps and bounds ahead, not to mention the giants like Omniture and Webtrends. Sophus3 have a good organisational foundation, they just need to seriously update their tool to bring it in line with other players.
Posted in 
Tags: 
Hi Jonny,
Thanks for elaborating your view & opinion, first on my blog and then here.
I think you raise an important point in your “pro’s” part: they do understand their customers i.e. the automotive industry. I am not sure that many WA vendors can pretend to have such expertise. Most traditional WA vendors are first selling their solution. Of course, things are changing and many started offering more “services”. But they can not pretend to be an expert in all areas. It is not because a vendor has 1 or 2 customers from a specific industry that it means it especially fully understand it.
So based on your comments and Sophus3′s one (see http://tinyurl.com/yfwot4j), I think that many manufacturers have chosen to favor the services & expertise against features like segmentation, path-analysis, goal tracking…. And possibly find these elsewhere, in another tool like GA (maybe that is one of the reasons of GA penetration). After all it is free
Oh, to clarify thing on my side too – my employer do not use eMetrics nor eDX. Some of our national companies do however but it is a local choice – not a pan-European one.
Cheers,
Michael
Michael
FYI : Further comments posted on the original blog
——–
Thanks for this very interesting review Michael.
Having been in charge of Interactive Marketing for both Renault in Paris and Nissan in Tokyo, I’d really like to highlight the benefits we get from Sophus3′s eDX program.
It really answers to the question “Gosh… how well do my competitors perform?”. We get a monthly report and analysis for each of our main markets, and that saves us loads of time in managing data, building an Executive Summary, and deciding of taking action.
The tool itself is really user-friendly and tailored for automotive professionals (That’s for eDX : I can’t comment on eMetrics as we use either Nedstat (Renault)or Omniture (Nissan) -GA is used on a local basis, and is NOT an HQ recommendation-). We can easily extract the information we need at a very operational level (i.e. when we compare the Renault Mégane vs. Toyota Auris).
At last, Sophus3 animates a forum twice a year, with all the eDX participants : Service is key to why we’ll keep on doing business with Sophus3.
The most important thing to remember is that, as car manufacturers, we DON’T CARE about the analytics tool! We DO CARE about getting the right information at the right time. We DO CARE about our bosses understanding what our job is about and why they should approuve the decisions we recommend.
In the end, GA could be the best analytics tool in the world, it is absolutely useless if it doesn’t help us getting our boss decide of how many millions of Euros we should invest in the Internet.
Sophus3 simply provides the best analytics service for a car manufacturer : expect them to grow continuously for the coming years!
Hi Jonny,
I wanted to ask you to do another review. Is not 100% analytics but is a segmentation and a/b – multivariate testing tool for websites. Let me know if your interested http://www.reedge.com/
Dennis van der Heijden
dennis (you know whats here) reedge.com
Hi Dennis, drop me a line at Jonny @ actionable-Analytics dot com