Client Description

AutoTrader.com, Inc. offers online marketplace for buying and selling used cars, light trucks, vans, and sport utility vehicles. The Company provides information for consumers regarding automotive products and services such as insurance, financing, and warranties. AutoTrader.com serves customers in the United States.

Challenge

Autotrader’s marketing support faced increasingly frustrated customers who were demanding more metrics on their advertising impressions. SAS analysts would spend hours building models and querying ever increasing data volumes on ever-aging legacy systems. Competitors were starting to harvest their own web logs and what they provided as out of the box metrics took days for Autotrader to generate.

Solution

iOLAP partnered with Autotrader to build an impression analytics processing engine utilizing Netezza analytic UDFs. Additionally, iOLAP designed and built a Kimball data warehouse that homogenized enterprise data to tie the impression data to enterprise data. Dealer impression reports were built using Microstrategy.

Benefits

For the first time, a solution on a single platform was created that could answer questions generated by dealers. Dealers could now see how their campaigns performed across different customer segments and products. This information helped them determine what products to promote as well as understanding what type of promotions generated the highest clicks to their dealerships or products. From a performance standpoint, the business could now focus on harvesting impression information across conformed dimensions. What took days previously could now be created in minutes.