Auto Trader Delivers Unrivaled, Marketplace Customer Experience

Overview

A unique opportunity to improve the UK’s and Ireland’s largest digital automotive marketplace. Auto Trader sits at the heart of the UK’s vehicle buying process, bringing together a large and engaged consumer audience, attracting circa 55 million cross platform visits each month, with circa 70% of visits coming through mobile devices.

In 2002, Auto Trader identified several opportunities within its rapidly increasing digital environment, realizing the risk of significant web delays from a lack of visibility due to insufficient website monitoring. The company’s operations team wanted to implement increased website monitoring from an outside perspective rather than just testing within its own datacenter, giving its operations team more transparency into the performance status of its websites.

As well as page tests, Auto Trader needed a solution to simulate a wide variety of customer user journeys, ranging on web users visiting its home page, searching for a car, or clicking on adverts. It also needed an independent source to report on uptime in order to drive internal reporting.

Putting Customer Journeys to the Test

In 2002, Auto Trader started working with Eggplant (formerly Site Confidence) providing both scripted website testing and Synthetic Monitoring, allowing it to offer testing and monitoring against critical business objectives. Auto Trader can now monitor website delays and test customer journeys across its website, giving it valuable user insight that is used to improve both the customer experience and overall website performance. Over the 15 years that Eggplant has worked with Auto Trader, Eggplant has frequently evolved its product to help Auto Trader stay at the cutting edge of web performance and customer experience.

According to Dave Whyte, Operations Engineering Lead at Auto Trader, the long standing partnership has proved to be a success

Exemplary Results

Auto Trader uses Eggplant’s product suite to optimize its website statistics and to achieve governance. If any of AutoTrader’s customers want to know information on its website performance, Auto Trader can use Eggplant to provide an independent source of information.

Auto Trader began by running approximately 10 page tests and three user journey tests with Eggplant, and have progressed to use over 100 page tests and 75 user journey tests. Last year alone, Auto Trader ran 19.5 million tests with Eggplant’s services, and currently has 194 monitors in place. These monitor page tests, page wait times, APIs, and email throughput, alongside simulating user journeys

Through Eggplant’s monitoring service, Auto Trader has reliable assurance that the availability and performance of its website is optimized for end users. Using a visualized monitoring screen, the company can investigate the cause of issues in order to solve them faster, which has paved the way for better site performance, and increased digital customer satisfaction.