Technical Consultation & Setup
Having been assigned the bulk of their PPC activity, lastminute.com then came to the Absorb analytics team with a simple proposal; ‘clean up our online tracking structure’. lastminute.com knew their existing tracking platform was unable to provide an accurate reflection of the company’s true performance, and it was time to find out why.
Absorb set out to introduce a bespoke analytics package, providing a marriage between a new, online channel analytics platform and lastminute.com’s existing onsite system; leading to seamless, accurate tracking and site performance.
Working closely with lastminute.com’s site team, their media agencies and biggest traffic providers we set about restructuring the way lastminute.com collects and analyses its data across Europe. Starting in the UK we quickly moved into the other main markets; France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Nordics. Each market had individual requests and permutations so appeasing these whilst keeping a core structure in place proved one of the biggest challenges.
Results
Sitting at the heart of all the markets lastminute.com now have a fully deduped, cross-channel tracking platform that provides access to all their data across Europe in real time. Now this has been established we are looking to encompass more advanced conversion information, actually synching up lastminute.com’s own internal trading system with the deduped, online channel figures.
lastminute.com can now see the true profitability of their company, knowing which products and services drive the most ROI, as well as understanding how and why their customers are converting.
Further Analysis
With the new analytics platform firmly in place we turned to how this data could actually be used to streamline advertising budgets and enhance online performance/revenue. This technical implementation has given rise to these key features for lastminute.com Europe:
- Cross-channel European Dashboard. This advanced reporting suite collates both the online and offline marketing data. Presenting lastminute.com’s performance by market, channel, product, and margin. Information is stored and displayed efficiently for side by side comparison and overall European analysis.
- Clickpath Analysis. The dataset that is now available is so vast and sophisticated that we are able to go beyond the last click model. We can display influence data down to an individual keyword, enabling us to highlight useful research areas that are integral for lastminute.com to utilise in order to gain customers.
- Affiliate deduplication. The new technical advances we have put in place allow us to become an extension of the lastminute.com site team itself. All affiliate tracking can now be hosted and triggered based on criteria outlined by lastminute.com, rather than from the affiliate network. This gives the client power and ultimately saves thousands in commission fees for sales the affiliate did not earn following a last click model.
- Behavioural targeting. An extremely useful extension of the technical setup allows for cookie-based behavioural retargeting, both offsite and onsite. Therefore, we can harness a visitor’s preferences and display highly relevant, dynamic advertising through various channels, even tailoring onsite pages based on their browsing or purchase history.
