Machineseeker Group: These are the Tools that OMR Podcast Regular Guest Sven Schmidt Relies On

1. "I do not see the added value of Analytics 360 for the current price"
2. Many SEO tools in use
3. New Employees Bring New Software
4. These are the tools that the Machineseeker Group uses

The Machineseeker Group (Maschinensucher.de, Machineseeker.com, TruckScout24, Werktuigen.nl & MSG Auctions) operates Europe's largest marketplace for used machines. Every month, the group's platforms reach over ten million machine buyers. Providers can book inexpensive ad packages to sell more machines at a higher price faster. Because every month, the Machineseeker Group mediates purchase inquiries with a net volume of more than six billion euros to over 10,000 providers. OMR regular Sven Schmidt, Maschinensucher founder Thorsten Muschler and CTO Christoph Brinkmann told us which technologies are behind the group's marketplaces. You can read the answers here.

In our new "Tech Stack" series, we show which tools digital industry companies use and have them explain why they chose these software solutions. Do you want more info on suitable tools? Then check out our software review platform OMR Reviews.

Founder Thorsten Muschler actually studied communication sciences, philosophy and psychology. He taught himself programming. And so the story of Maschinensucher starts in 1999 with a "code" in the programming language PERL. But there is nothing left of it today. The online marketplace of his company is now based on the LAMP-Stack. A total of 15 developers work in the offices in Munich and Essen. The framework used for the Maschinensucher applications is "Yii2". Additional components such as a load balancer and HW firewall are added to the high availability cluster. All business-relevant functions are monitored in real-time monitoring with Netdata.

Maschinensucher founder Thorsten Muschler

The heart of the Machineseeker Group is the control center developed in-house, in addition to the online portal. Customer management, ad management and invoicing run through it. "If the control center doesn't work, our entire administration is, in fact, unemployed," says Sven Schmidt. The infrastructure is complemented by software such as Hubspot, Microsoft Office 365 and Sipgate. "We developed the core components for our business ourselves, for everything else we rely on standard software, if possible," says Maschinensucher CTO Christoph Brinkmann.

"I do not see the added value of Analytics 360 for the current price"

For tracking, Machineseeker uses Google Analytics and Firebase. "The data in Google Analytics is becoming increasingly inaccurate due to browsers' increasingly strict handling of third-party cookies. Moreover, data sampling is a problem. However, I do not see the added value of Analytics 360 for the current price," adds the CMO of the Machineseeker Group. Therefore, more and more own data are visualized in the Redash tool. "Each department has its own dashboards. We use this tool every day," says Schmidt.

Besides analytics, the marketing team of Maschinensucher relies on Google tools Tag Manager, Optimize and Ads Editor. For email marketing, Sparkpost and Mailchimp recently ActiveCampaign

Many SEO tools in use

Maschinensucher CTO Christoph Brinkmann

In the SEO area, the Machineseeker Group uses many well-known SEO tools like Sistrix, Audisto, Ahrefs and Screaming Frog SEO Spider from third-party providers for various SEO tasks. At the same time, the company uses services that search engine providers themselves provide - be it the Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools or Yandex Webmaster. "Due to the large number of domains and languages we have, we can carry out tests with regard to the respective search engines and evaluate them using the different tools," says CEO Thorsten Muschler. "The SEO department can also intervene directly in the page structure as well as the page contents via the internal CMS," adds Christoph Brinkmann.

New Employees Bring New Software

With the size the group has now reached, optimizing the tech stack is becoming an ever bigger challenge, as existing tools and processes have to grow. "Especially with new colleagues it is of course exciting which milestones they have already successfully mastered with which software and what we can implement from that," says Sven Schmidt. The tech stack of Maschinensucher is therefore never set in stone.

Do you want to bring your expertise to the Machineseeker Group? Then simply apply here - here are all available jobs.

These are the tools that the Machineseeker Group uses

Here is a list of all the tools that the Machineseeker Group uses: