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Web Analysis Project for Volvo Conducted by: Huiruo Zhang, Dongqi Wang, Yuezhi Xu, Ruibing Ji Date: 12/11/2016 Web Analytics
W e b A n a l y s i s P r o j e c t f o r V o l v o
Conducted by: Huiruo Zhang, Dongqi Wang, Yuezhi Xu, Ruibing Ji Date: 12/11/2016 Web Analytics
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary ........................................................................................................... 3
Social Media Analysis ........................................................................................................ 4
a. Twitter API ................................................................................................................. 4
b. Twitter Analysis & Facebook Analysis ......................................................................... 5
c. Social Media Referral Traffic Analysis .......................................................................... 7
d. Google AdWords ........................................................................................................ 8
Sentiment Analysis ............................................................................................................ 9
a. Sentiment analysis for official channels ...................................................................... 9
b. Sentiment analysis for social media .......................................................................... 11
Website and Content Analysis ......................................................................................... 12
Keywords Analysis ........................................................................................................ 14
E-‐mail (Newsletter) Sign-‐up Analysis ............................................................................ 17
a. Subscribers growth analysis in Salesforce system ....................................................... 18
b. E-‐mail Newsletter engagement analysis in Salesforce system .................................... 18
c. Site conversions track in Google Analytics and also Salesforce system ....................... 19
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 21
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Executive Summary
Volvo Car Corporation is a Swedish automobile manufacturer established in 1927.
Recently, Volvo Car Corporation was sold to Zhejiang Geely Holding Group of China. Now
Volvo Car Corporation is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Geely. Volvo Cars’ largest
markets are in the United States, Sweden, China and Belgium. After the acquisition, Volvo
Cars sold 449,255 cars globally in 2011, an increase of 20.3% compared to 2010. However,
the sales were decreasing since then in the U.S. market. What’s worse, the trend had been
continuing for several years. So our team would like to design a SEO campaign to find out if
we could help Volvo to increase its brand awareness, make products improvement and
create more traffic online. To be specific, we had three small goals for this campaign. We
wanted to understand how people think about Volvo, increase Volvo Cars keyword research
relevance and grow subscriber lists.
Our team decided to use four methods & approaches to achieve our campaign goals,
Social Media Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Content Analysis, and Subscribers Analysis. We
conducted social media analysis and sentiment analysis to track followers’ numbers on
Twitter and Facebook and obtained their attitude towards Volvo brand and products. Then
we did website structure analysis and content analysis to crawl Volvo U.S. official website
and find out keywords in which customer might be interested. After that, we started our
subscriber analysis to drive website traffic and grow subscribers. We utilized Google
Analytics to help us to monitor KPIs, such as Sessions, Bounce Rate, Time on Site, and
Conversion Rate, etc.
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Social Media Analysis
a. Twitter API
First of all, we created a Python file to collect and analyze tweets of Volvo through
Twitter API. We filtered out the data by printing out only the ID of the twitters and the
content of the tweets. It is easier for us to pull out all useful information and rule out the
irrelevant ones.
We ran the Module by the end of date December 1st, 2016, and we got a 25 MB dataset,
containing around over 500 tweets. There are two variables in our dataset, twitter ID and
tweets content. The results showed us all kinds of information, while according to our goals
we set up before this project; we care about two aspects mostly.
1) Customer attitude towards the brand and product.
One of our main goals to conduct this project is to understand people’s opinions
about Volvo and its product lines. Due to several reasons, it is hard for the company
to truly get customers thoughts. Social media is a great way to figure that out.
People usually talk freely under the tweets and posts. As a result, we could dig out a
lot of useful information from social media and listen to the real voice of our
customers. Customer opinion is crucial for company to conduct some research and
product development.
2) Attract customers to Volvo Official Website – Promotional Purposes
Through Twitter API, we could see that most content people tweet and discuss are
from the official account of Volvo. This information on official accounts could attract
more customers to the official website.
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b. Twitter Analysis & Facebook Analysis
Nowadays, almost every company create official social media account such as Twitter
and Facebook to post pictures, tweet advertising and write articles for promotion purposes.
According to the official account of Volvo, the company has over 130k followers on
Twitter, and over 1 million followers on Facebook. It is a considerable number. The official
account on social media can have a big influence on current and potential customers if the
company takes the right action.
Chart 1 Volvo Official Twitter Account
Char2 Volvo Facebook Official Account
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Through Twitter Analysis and Facebook Analysis, we could see that:
• Whenever we post new things, the number of people we reach will increase. So
keeping posting can help the company reach people.
• The key words we found on Twitter and Facebook of Volvo includes functional cars,
service, family commuting, safety and luxury cars. Based on these key words
findings, we could conduct some SEO strategies.
• The quality of our posts will affect the number of reach. For instance, we post
something interesting on Apr 13th and May 3rd; the people we reach were
increasing significantly. And also, customers like to interact with the company. Some
vote activities and discussion proposal may help drawing attention.
• Related to trendy and popular topic: The commercial posted on May 3, near
Mother’s day, is related to some popular and trendy topics. People would like to
discuss in a specific period, and it draw people’s attention. So we can connect our
brand to some popular topics. It will help the company in two ways: one is that
positive brand association; the other is to attract potential customers to follow us
and inspire their interests in Volvo brand and products.
Chart 3 People reached
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Chart 4 Post Engagement
Chart 5 Video Views
c. Social Media Referral Traffic Analysis
In order to reach out to more audiences and drive traffic to the website, Volvo is very
active on Facebook and Twitter. They can use social media to increase brand awareness,
introduce new product/ services and create dialogue. For example, Volvo posts a message
on Facebook to introduce its concierge services. Every time a person clicks that link, he/ she
will be led to the specific page on Volvo’s website. Actually we are using Google Analytics to
monitor its engagement. Facebook, regarded as one of the referral path, can be evaluated
by # Sessions, Bounce Rate and Pages/ Session. We use these two metrics to observe the
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overall performance of Facebook every month. If we want to track the specific case of the
“Volvo Concierge Services”, we will filter that link as the landing page. With the same
metrics, we can observe whether it is effective to drive the website traffic and also its
engagement.
Chart 6 Facebook Engagement Tracking
d. Google AdWords
After the social media analysis, we got some key words for Volvo. As a result, in
order to help the company increase brand awareness and attract more customers to our
official website, we could use the Google AdWords to conduct a SEO campaign for the
company. Pay Per Click (PPC) is quite suitable for the company. We could rank the key
words found in previous research by their importance, and take their priorities in Google
AdWords. As a car manufacture, ‘buying cars’ should go first when people are searching the
item. Then Volvo is selling their products as ‘functional’ and ‘safety’, so these words should
follow then.
Through Google Adwords PPC campaign, the company could narrow down all people
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searching cars to their own potential customers. Then, the company can provide them with
the most accurate information they need and the best customer services.
Chart 7 Google Adwords
Sentiment Analysis
a. Sentiment analysis for official channels
Purchasing a car is a large expense for most of families and persons, so almost all the
customers would search a lot of reference information about the car online in advance.
According to one survey, about 81% of customers will take the relevant information in
official channels into consideration in U.S before purchasing a car. For Volvo Group, the
contents that are relevant to them in online official channels can have great influence on
the decision process of their potential customers. In order to fully understand people’s
attitude toward Volvo in official channels, we did a sentiment analysis for those online
contents from 2012-‐2016.
We got our data from ABI/inform collection database and those articles we mainly used
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come from magazines, reports, trade journals and newspapers. We used over one hundred
articles to do the analysis for each year from 2012-‐2016. The tool we chose to do the
sentiment analysis is Semantria. It is a very useful tool owned by sentiment analysis
company Lexalytics, from which it was spun out in 2011. It offers text analysis via Excel
plugin, which makes analysis process easier. At the same time, it incorporates a bigger
knowledge base and uses deep learning to make sure the accuracy of each analysis.
We did the analysis for each year separately and then put all the result in one chart
(Chart8), so we can not only see the specific data for each year but also see the long-‐term
trend clearly. In the chart, the red area represents the percentage of negative contents, the
yellow area represents the positive, and grey area represents the neutral.
Chart 8 sentiment analysis for official channels from 2012-‐2016
From the result, we can know that the percentage of positive contents kept increasing
from 2012 to 2016. And at the same time, the percentage of negative contents kept
decreasing. The percentage of neural contents was relatively stable from 2013-‐2016. There
50% 53% 60% 61% 65%
37% 32% 30% 30% 32%
14% 14% 10% 9% 3%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Senlment Analysis From 2012-‐2016
Posilve Neutral Negalve
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were barely negative contents in 2016. We can say that Volvo has already done a lot for
self-‐improvement in these years and got the recognition in official channels. What the Volvo
should do is to keep this trend in future days.
b. Sentiment analysis for social media
Even though most customers will consider the information in official channel before
purchasing a car, the social media still can make a great influence on creating a great brand
image in daily life. Making good use of the contents in social media can help attract people’s
attention and create more potential customers for Volvo.
What we did is to do the sentiment analysis for the contents about Volvo in social
media, so we can understand how people think about Volvo in daily life. Twitter is an online
news and social networking service where users post and read short 140-‐character
messages called "tweets". Twitter is also an Top10 traffic website globally. In this analysis,
we chose Twitter as the representation of the social medias to be our resource. We used
over 300 popular tweets recently talking about Volvo to do the analysis in Semantria. We
used a pie chart (Chart9) to show the result.
Chart9 Sentiment Analysis for Twitter
29%
65%
7%
Sencment Analysis for Twider
posilve neutral negalve
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From the chart, we can see that the distribution of the percentage is totally different
from the official channels. A large part of those tweets is neutral and only 29% are deemed
as positive contents. It means that when people searching Volvo in Twitter, unlike in official
channels, they can’t see a lot of positive contents. Instead of positive praise and recognition,
people see more basic introduction and plain description about Volvo in social media. This is
really not a good news for Volvo Group. Through the comparison, we think making a great
improvement in social media should be one key point for Volvo Group in the future.
Website and Content Analysis
We wanted to help Volvo website has higher keyword search relevancy, so we decided
to do website structure analysis and content analysis, improving SERs. First we used
Screaming Frog SEO Spider 6.2 to crawl Volvo U.S. official website,
http://www.volvocars.com/us. We wanted to have a look at Volvo website structures and
see if there is something could be improved. Then we intended to do content analysis to
find out some keywords with which customers thought Volvo cars associated. Next, based
on those keywords, we could make our suggestion on Volvo’s website by adding keywords
or updating contents to increase search relevancy.
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The chart below is our website crawl result.
Chart 10 Crawl results for Volvo U.S. official website
We could tell that the generation view of Volvo U.S. website. Most link pages (73.2%)
were on the third depth (Clicks from Start URL) while 21 pages, 32 pages, and 4 pages were
on the first, second and fourth depth. From our opinion, Volvo website had a good start; the
link pages of the landing website were not too much. Browsers were unlikely to open
another page when they accidently clicked their mouse. And the most number of depths for
Volvo website is four which is acceptable for most viewers. So we believed that the
structure of Volvo U.S. website is pretty good.
After that, we searched reviews for Volvo cars on https://www.edmunds.com/volvo/
and https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/volvo.htm (Top 405 compliant and
reviews about Volvo). We counted the top 10 keywords and made a word cloud for those
reviews.
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Keywords Analysis
Chart 11 Top 10 keywords on Volvo’s review
Top 10 keywords for Volvo on https://www.edmunds.com/volvo/
From the figure, we can see that many customers considered that Volvo was safe.
Safety is Volvo’s brand image in people’s mind. And online research results also indicated
that. Volvo was considered the best safety rated sedans of 2015 and 2016.
Chart 12 Best Safety Sedans of 2015
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Best safety rated sedans of 2015 on
http://www.kbb.com/best-‐safety-‐rated-‐cars/sedan/2015/
Chart 13 Best Safety Sedans of 2016
Best safety rated sedans of 2016 on
http://www.kbb.com/best-‐safety-‐rated-‐cars/sedan/2016/
Besides safety, we hoped to find some other keywords to improve SERs. Thus, we made
a word cloud for reviews on https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/volvo.htm. We
deleted some words which were useless, like at, the, etc., and tried to kept adjectives and
nouns. There were some new keywords from the word cloud, such as Helpful, Satisfaction,
Service, Dealership, Engine, Battery, Problem, etc. Those were what customers cared about
and what Volvo needed to add in its website.
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Chart 14 Word Cloud results on 405 Volvo’s reviews
Word cloud for reviews on https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/volvo.htm
From Automotive News we knew that followings were most influential in customers’
buying cars decisions.
(http://www.autonews.com/article/20120531/RETAIL07/120539974/what-‐influences-‐car-‐b
uyers-‐the-‐most%3F-‐salespeople)
Chart 15 Factors influence purchasing behavior in the rankings
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There are three ways Volvo can do to increase its SERs. Those ways are painted red.
Some customers would not search Volvo directly, however, they will search ‘best safety cars,
best car engines, car dealers, best quality cars’ instead. We suggest Volvo do three things.
First, add those new keywords contents in its U.S. website and write some articles around
them. Second, cooperate with dealers, persuading them to put Volvo information on the
landing page when the search word is associated with Volvo and make a link with Volvo
website. Third, cooperate with third party website and some professional institutes,
updating reports and news, and bid ads on those new keywords directly guiding to those
report pages. We believe that it could help Volvo improve search relevancy and increase
PageRank, website sessions and conversion rate.
E-‐mail (Newsletter) Sign-‐up Analysis
Volvo is about making life simpler for the customers by putting the whole online world
at their fingertips. Volvo’s website is very comprehensive encouraging visitors to explore it
to get the information they need which include but not limited to dealer’s information, best
deals, car services, insurance. Hopefully visitors will give out their information and sign up as
subscribers who are deemed potential customers. It is a good way to keep people in Volvo’s
environment and build two ways communications. As we want to drive traffic to Volvo’s
website and more importantly is to grow and maintain our customer’s database, E-‐mail
campaign is an effective way to drive the website traffic and grow the subscriber list.
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a. Subscribers growth analysis in Salesforce system
Volvo is sending out the monthly newsletter to the existing prospects. The number of
Mailable Prospects is the key metrics we can to track every month. From this number, we
will know how many subscribers we have every month thus by comparing the numbers in
two months we will know whether we are having more or less subscribers. We will also
calculate the Subscriber Growth Rate by using # Subscribers difference of two adjacent
months divided by # Subscribers in the previous month. Being aware of these metrics, we
can have the conclusion of the overall performance in acquiring new potential customers.
Chart 16 Monthly newsletter #Mailable prospects
b. E-‐mail Newsletter engagement analysis in Salesforce system
We want to know how we did about the E-‐mail campaign each month. It is for the
newsletter improvement in the future. The more we resonate with our audiences, the more
likely they will stay with us. Thereby we still leverage the Salesforce system to extract the
data and look into the metrics like HTML Open Rate, Unique Click Through Rate. These
metrics tell us how are our E-‐mails engaged with the audience. Besides we will look at the
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detailed clicks report where we can see each clickable section’s performance, in other words
which part of our newsletter engage the audiences the most. By comparing the data with
historic data, we are able to evaluate the performance thus to alter the strategy.
Chart 17 HTML Open rate & CTRs
c. Site conversions track in Google Analytics and also Salesforce system
As Volvo aims to increase the website traffic and also convert these visitors to
subscribers, (1) we set up the dashboard in Google Analytics to monitor the website traffic
and performance. # Unique Visitor is the useful metrics telling us how many unique visitor
coming to our website. (2) After exploring the website, interested visitors would click “Get
News from Volvo” button on the website to sign up as subscribers. We mark this action as
one of the site conversions. Every time we receive the “thank-‐you-‐for-‐signing-‐up” feedback,
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the Salesforce system will mark it successful. Then we mark down the conversion rate by
using the # successful sign-‐up E-‐mails divided by # Unique Visitor.
Chart 18 #Site Visits
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Conclusion
To sum up, in this project, we did social media analysis, sentiment analysis, website and
content analysis as well as the subscriber analysis. We found out how people think of
Volvo’s brand and its product line both on gated channel and non-‐gated channel then listed
the keywords standing as the people’s opinions about the brand out of the analysis. We
wanted to use the keywords to conduct the PPC campaign to increase the searching
relevancy and content quality and reliability on website. We also touched on how to
improve consumer’s decision funnel by website and content analysis. We made
observations on consumer trend on social media platform like they will be engaged with
some specific format of the news/ events on some special days. Thus we can leverage such
findings to improve our contents on good timing to increase more dialogues on social
medias. Last but not least is the newsletter campaign among our potential consumers.
Maintaining the existing listeners should be regarded as important as growing new
audiences. Thus we did newsletter campaign analysis to monitor our performance in site
conversion and audience engagement. We hope this SEO campaign will increase the site
traffic and polish Volvo’s brand image in the public, ultimately Volvo will gain increased
sales.
