Overview

Luxury car company Lexus has 28 dealerships throughout Australia that, until recently, were primarily focused on supporting customers and owners in their brick-and-mortar locations.

However, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns made it critical for each dealership to have greater visibility of the digital customer journey.

IE recognised that dealers needed more oversight over their online presence, and recommended  the creation of a dashboard to show dealers how users are interacting with their website. As many in-person interactions migrated to the digital space, IE was proactive in ensuring that the dealers maintained oversight over how their customers were interacting with all touchpoints. The resulting dashboard can be fired up at any time, and gives up-to-the-hour data on what customers are doing on-site, while also giving Lexus Australia better oversight of its dealer network.

Challenge

The backend data infrastructure is complex, due to years of iterative development and multiple digital upgrades. As such, we had two main challenges to overcome:

1) Ensuring the data used to build the dealer dashboards were of high quality; and

2) Creating an engaging dashboard which is relevant and actionable for dealerships.

To be effective, the dashboard data needed to meet the following criteria: 

  1. Validity: ensuring website data adhered to existing business definitions
  2. Accuracy: capturing true behaviours and ensuring data was correctly tagged in the backend
  3. Completeness: handling missing data points and correcting data flows
  4. Consistency: avoiding duplicates and ensuring aggregations were correct
  5. Uniformity: creating uniform formatting across all dealership website dashboards

In addition, we wanted to ensure the dashboard was visually engaging by highlighting how each metric contributes to the marketing funnel.

The dashboard is great. So easy for us to access all this vital information
LAUREN STEWART, MARKETING MANAGER, STEWART AUTOMOTIVE GROUP

Our delivered solution is a comprehensive view of digital performance for each Lexus dealership. Each dealer dashboard is structured into three distinct sections:

Approach

IE took the following approach to create the dashboard:

  1. Designed the dashboard based on existing monthly reports used for the national website
  2. Reviewed and analysed data quality of key metrics
  3. Created a dealership dashboard prototype using Google Data Studio
  4. Shared the prototype with selected dealerships to understand usability
  5. Refined the dashboard based on client feedback
  6. Finalised the dashboard for the first dealership use case
  7. Created the production process to replicate across the further 27 dealerships

Solution

1. How to use this dashboard: A one-page summary of how to interpret the metrics in the dashboard and contextualise them in the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel (as opposed to more complex models like the flywheel) was selected as the heuristic to understand the user journey because it is widely known and easy to understand.

2. Overview of digital performance: A summary of the key metrics that yield a clear picture of the health of the marketing funnel.

3. Full view of digital performance metrics: This is a comprehensive breakdown of every metric that a dealer could want. This was included in anticipation of requests from dealers for specific metrics. By putting all the data in the dealers’ hands, we avoided having to manually extract various pieces of information.

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