If you have ever had a credit check carried out on you, the chances are that you have come into contact with Experian without even realising it. Credit checking agency Experian also provides data checks on vehicle histories, and its service is widely used in the world of used car sales. It is into this arena that the company has launched its latest product, MarketView Online.

Anyone in the motor industry who is familiar with Experian’s detailed breakdowns of car sales and registrations will be at home with MarketView Online, although this is the first time that Experian has put all its data on one website. Previously, to access this information, a subscriber would have had to order a range of reports and pay for each report individually.

The key advantages of the MarketView Online site are that the information is regularly updated and can be seen alongside archived data for a clearer picture of market trends. Users can also choose from a variety of ways to arrange the data to suit their needs.

Filter system
The main aim of MarketView Online is to allow anyone with an interest in car sales to track what has been sold and where. Entry to the site is by password, which controls what information is shown to a specific user.

Once you have signed in, the main page offers up a number of choices for filtering the information down to exactly what you want. This is especially useful if you have signed up to all three sections of the website: new cars, used cars and the UK car parc (the pool of all UK-registered cars).

Keeping your choices broad brings up a huge amount of data, collated from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and t heSociety of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. However, the sheer volume of the information held by the site makes some degree of filtering a necessity.

You can reduce the data to a more manageable quantity by restricting it to a single car manufacturer or a variety of those you’re interested in. It’s also possible to filter by sector type, such as superminis, sports cars or 4x4s, and fuel type.

By selecting ever more criteria, you can quickly whittle the vast amount of information down to incredibly specific details. Those in the motor industry will find the ability to select information by region, county or even postal district of great value as it shows what is selling in particular locations. This astonishingly exact information can be displayed as a chart, which is easily exported into an Excel spreadsheet, or shown as a colour-coded map of the selected area.

The other invaluable tool is the website’s ability to analyse the information. Again, you can select as many car manufacturers, models or sectors as you wish from the dropdown menu. Sales information can then be shown as a graph that tells you how well a car or company is performing in a particular area of the country. This can help users to pinpoint where best to target a sales drive or marketing push.

Projections
This analytical ability also means that MarketView Online can be used to provide forecasts, based on historical data held by the site. The archive goes back to the beginning of 2005 for new cars and further for used car information. As you work through MarketView Online, you can save any charts, graphs or forecasts and store them for future use.

There is no doubting the quality and usefulness of the information held and supplied here for anyone in the UK motor industry. It also makes access to this information far quicker and easier to get at than the previous system of ordering reports that were out of date the moment they were posted. The website is targeted at professionals who know their way around the jargon of the motor industry, but it is simple to use, although making use of the various menus is essential to home in on exact information.

The style of the site is very workmanlike and there are no design flourishes to distract from the purpose of supplying complex information in a simple, easily understood form. For this reason, it would be churlish to criticise the plain style of the website; the use of colour for charts and graphs makes it easier to grasp their meaning.

Subscribers pay for the quality of the information rather than fancy layout. A basic annual subscription costs from £3,750 for access to one database in a specific region of the UK, rising to £20,000 for access to all three databases across all the UK. It’s not cheap, but the information and analysis is first rate. Users have access to the information at any time and should save money by not having to order individual reports from Experian.

For anyone in the motor industry, this site has just become an indispensable online tool.