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

——–

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!

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

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jonnylongden: My review of web analytics vendor and bain of my life for a long time, Sophus3 – http://is.gd/53YeM – #measure…