How Carwow Went Full Throttle and Increased Data Content Consumption by 97%

Business decisions are only as reliable as the quality of the data we collect, store, and analyse. If we don’t consistently monitor and improve our data collection and management processes, we can’t trust the data to make confident decisions.

Reliable data enables us to measure the impact of product decisions accurately, and in the auto sales industry, we’d be lost without it.

Stalling out with inaccessible data

I’m the senior product analyst at Carwow Group, an online car-changing marketplace for buying, selling, or leasing vehicles. We started as a review site and quickly grew to one of the largest car-changing retailers in Europe. To put this in perspective, we grew 50% in 2024.

While we’ve experienced significant growth, our product analytics team remains small. Still, we support many product, engineering, and commercial teams, and finding time to analyse and ask questions of our data is one of our biggest challenges. We have to aggressively prioritise our work, which sometimes means shifting more long-term tasks to the back burner.

For a long time, one of those tasks was improving our data analytics game. Improving both data access and data quality would open up self-serve for more business users, removing some pressure from our team and helping our colleagues make more informed decisions faster.

The mission was simple: make it easy for anyone at Carwow to find and confidently use the data they needed to do their jobs. All we needed was a way to realise these ambitions.

Shifting data improvements into high gear

Since we had such limited resources and no specialist web analytics, web tagging, or data quality roles, we started thinking about the best way to leverage what we already had. The answer was Amplitude.

Carwow had been using Amplitude Analytics dashboards, charts, and event tracking for a while at that point. I didn’t have any experience with the platform when I came to Carwow, but as I became more familiar with its features, it was clear that Amplitude was one of our greatest assets.

At the time, product analysts were the heaviest Amplitude users. I wanted to increase usage across departments, even if people didn’t have the ability to start building charts on their own.

With this in mind, I got to work on a comprehensive plan that involved:

• Making our data more usable. I began thoroughly categorising each of our events, adding owners and descriptions wherever appropriate. Doing so ensured data consistency and built trust.
• Upskilling existing Amplitude users. I committed to a weekly Amplitude-themed Slack post, where I shared tips and tricks, new features, and more. This additional information increased user confidence and awareness of ways to use Amplitude for data-driven decision-making.
• Training future users. We made Amplitude training part of the onboarding process for all new product team members. In addition, I started hosting 1:1 training sessions and live group sessions, then created internal documentation for colleagues who preferred to learn more independently.

These initiatives democratised data and improved teams’ confidence—and I soon had the data to back that up.

Increased engagement proves we’re on the right track

Today, more of my Carwow colleagues are accessing data than ever before, and thanks to consistent event management and property clean-ups, we have richer, cleaner, more usable data that provides the insights we need to improve our product.

We’ve experienced:

• An average 34% improvement in data quality scores (across all key dealership sites in the UK, Germany, and Spain)
• A 32% increase in Amplitude users in the last six months
• A 97% increase in consuming any data content
• A 41% increase in chart interactions from quarter to quarter
• A 21% increase in consuming chart content
• A 7% increase in people actively querying

We still have a long road ahead, especially as we plan to upgrade to Amplitude's latest SDK and take advantage of Session Replay. Our internal stakeholders have been so pleased by our progress that they’ve pledged 10% of our product team’s resources to continually improve our Amplitude web data.

A great partner rides shotgun

This data improvement project would've been a massive undertaking for one person, but I wasn’t alone. Carwow’s Amplitude account manager, Jose Martins, has been nothing short of fantastic and has supported me every step of the way.

Jose and I covered many topics in our 1:1 meetings, from issues and possible solutions to ideas for further impact. He also offered extensive support on some of my more nuanced data health questions, which made a tangible difference in the quality and usability of our data.

Jose also supported our new users, going above and beyond to make sure they would succeed. For example, he helped accelerate onboarding for a new product analyst who didn’t have any prior experience with Amplitude. Jose shared some resources and suggested online courses to get started, and today, that product analyst is one of the top Amplitude users at Carwow.

Cruising to data confidence

Amplitude has been a powerful partner for Carwow, and being more intentional about its use allowed us to optimise the platform even further. With Amplitude, multiple possibilities are becoming realities: improved data health, more self-service workflows, and higher-quality web data that our stakeholders can trust.

Amplitude gave our team the confidence to trust our data and spread this conviction across our organisation so we can make the right decisions for our users.