Brands that run advanced analytics in-house know they aren’t just owning campaign measurement – they’ll have to mine data from scores, if not hundreds, of vendors, publishers and partners.
Trivago’s marketing team was bogged down managing the sheer number of API plugins and rationalizing data from disparate sources. Across the advertising and analytics group, 40 people were spending up to 80 hours per day downloading and standardizing data.
A year and a half ago, the hotel search platform sought to address the issue with the customer data platform Datorama, which has since been acquired by Salesforce.
A big benefit was automating manual data input, said Ruthvick Poornachandra, tools and automation project manager for the brand marketing team at Trivago. The move to Datorama cut manual data entry down from about nine hours per day to only five minutes.
As a result, Trivago’s marketers could focus on more interesting tasks.
“We wanted to concentrate on performance monitoring in-house, and cleaning and streamlining the data like this is critical to the ultimate goal of having time to do more innovative things,” said Poornachandra.
And the increased speed and reliability of data coming into the system also affects Trivago’s real-time campaign capabilities, Poornachandra said.
Previously, it could take weeks to onboard data from sources in different countries, campaigns or parts of Trivago’s advertising group to measure with daily Nielsen numbers.
Now that process happens every day, speeding campaign optimization, Poornachandra said.
It also helps prevent human error that occurs when inputting data into spreadsheets, reducing reporting errors by 15%.
This decrease means that fewer mistakes find their way into campaign attribution.
Using Datorama has also shifted the marketing team’s mentality about automation, Poornachandra said. “We’re more focused on automating processes and comfortable taking people out of the equation in cases.”
