Context: Cost of Sales Analysis for Marketing

Europcar Mobility Group is a global leader in mobility with 75 years of expertise: their purpose is clearly defined in their communication:

“We help to change the way you move” is what we stand for and brings us together. More than ever, we’re committed to delivering simple, seamless, innovative solutions that make mobility easy, enjoyable and eco-friendly. To achieve this, we offer individuals and businesses a wide range of car and van rental services—for a few hours, days, a week, a month or longer—relying on a large and diversified fleet.

Our brands address differentiated needs, use cases and expectations: Europcar®, a leader in car and light commercial vehicle rental, Goldcar®, a frontrunner in providing low-cost car rental services in Europe, and Fox-Rent-A-Car®, one of the main players in the US car rental market with a “value for money” positioning.

Customers’ satisfaction is at the heart of the Group’s ambition and that of our more than 8,000 employees, everywhere we deliver our mobility solutions, thanks to a strong network in over 130 countries (including 14 wholly owned subsidiaries completed by franchisees and alliance partners)..”

In this international context, Europcar relies on Qlik as a central platform for data analysis and processing. Marketing and acquisition teams regularly manage large-scale campaigns and seek to supervise the performance of these campaigns across different international agencies.

The goal is to be able to quickly detect performance variations, understand their causes, and act quickly on marketing strategies. 

In this context, Europcar chose to rely on Datama Compare, integrated as a visualization extension in Qlik, to more finely analyze performance variations in Cost of Sales (COS).

This initiative is part of the Business Intelligence team’s action, which is heavily focused on adding value for its stakeholders. This highly technical and analytical team’s main mission is to produce strategic analyses and data-driven recommendations essential for guiding decision-making.

Approach: Structuring and Crossing Data

To measure the real impact of marketing campaigns on the Cost of Sales, the teams sought to analyze correlations between several key levers:

• effectiveness of marketing and acquisition campaigns

• fleet availability

• pricing variation

The approach adopted consists of building a market equation allowing the decomposition of Cost of Sales (COS) performance into several operational indicators.

This equation models the main KPI Cost of Sales from three key components:

• CPS (Cost per Shopper)

• SCVR (Shopper Conversion Rate)

• AOV (Average Order Value)

Integrating this equation into Datama Compare within Qlik allows teams to monitor the variations of each lever and identify with precision their impact on the main performance.

Results

Integration in Qlik

Once connected to the prepared dataset, the analyses are directly actionable in Qlik via the Datama Compare extension, and variations on each sub-KPI will be automatically observed.

(Note of course that the data below is fictional – you can find an example dataset here)

Using Datama Compare in Qlik is ideal because the report is accessible to different teams, allowing insights to be immediately available to all stakeholders, including each country, with appropriate filters. Furthermore, the Datama tool is based on the same data model in Qlik, considered reliable by the entire team. Business teams can thus explore the causes of variations without systematically depending on the data team for every new question.

Benefits

Thanks to this approach, Europcar has been able to improve:

• effectiveness of Cost of Sales analysis

• availability of key insights

• autonomy of business teams in performance analysis

The integration of Datama Compare in Qlik offers a better understanding of performance levers, strengthens business team reactivity, and contributes to optimizing the impact of marketing campaigns on the Cost of Sales.