So bmw.co.za went live a few days before I went off to Italy. A word of advice, this is not really a good time either to go on holiday or launch a site.

Retrospective:
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can get a really good look at the bmw dot cozas of yesteryear:

» 11 April 1997 - this one, BMW.co.za’s first web presence, is a real beaut. Built by Tool, who don’t seem to exist anymore.
» 2 April 2001 - This is the design that somehow stood the test of time until April 2007.

The homepage did evolve a few times after I arrived in 2005, but the crappy frame structure and its lack of quality browser support continued.

With the updating of BMW’s online corporate identity, came a new site from BMW HQ. The site wasn’t without issues and so my courageous agency, Aqua Online and I rebuilt it from scratch.

The result - a lean, spiderable, optimised, and beautiful machine.

One of the most exciting things for me since going live is the ability to track more accurately. The frames that held the previous site together distorted everything, to the point where it just wasn’t worth the effort.

I’m currently using Clicktracks Pro and Google Analytics as my primary web analytics data sources. I’m currently using Google Analytics for the funnel tracking on our used car search (Clicktracks supposedly has a really good funnel tracker, but its a little bit more of a mission to set up (i’m not lazy, just busy)).

Alexa traffic rank since going live:

I quite like to look give the web stats context by creating a character who is the average of everything that we see in the data. This is useful in explaining stats to those who didn’t know they were actually interesting..

So, Bob is a visitor to bmw.co.za. There’s just less than 50% chance that he’s returning to the site to look for more information. He finds the site rather useful (or confusing perhaps?) as he looks at more than 7 pages per each of his visits. We (BMW) have his attention for almost 6 minutes.
He probably landed on the site by entering “www.bmw.co.za” directly into his browser or clicked on a link in an email (or via a bookmark), but there’s a 20% chance he came from a search engine, and a slightly smaller chance he came from another link (online media, blog link etc).
If he found the site by searching for “bmw premium selection” there’s a good chance that he went through the used car search and dealer contact process (although there’s also a good chance he left the funnel - we’re working on that!).
He’s probably from Joburg.
He’s most interested in the 3 Series.

Anyway, I’ve spent way too long on this post, so I’m going to stop there and press publish.