Tag Archives: case study

Watchfinder clocks 1300% ROI using precision Remarketing with Google Analytics

Watchfinder is a leading UK retailer of premium, pre-owned watches. The company was founded in 2002 as an online-only store selling watches from more than 80 premier manufacturers. Today, it has an annual turnover of £25 million and has recently opened a flagship boutique in the London Royal Exchange.


Counting the hours 
Considering the average order value on Watchfinder’s site is over £3,500, the company found buying decisions tended to take time, often spanning weeks or months. In fact, less than 1% of visitors were completing purchases on their first site visit. Watchfinder’s challenge was to re-engage and also maintain a conversation with these visitors, encouraging them to return and make an order. In addition to driving customers back to its site, Watchfinder also wanted to encourage customers to visit its new physical boutique in the London Royal Exchange.

A moment to reconnect
Watchfinder’s agency Periscopix – a Google Analytics Certified Partner – suggested Remarketing with Google Analytics as a great way to reconnect with users. Remarketing with Google Analytics allows advertisers to tap into valuable insights about website visitors who show an interest in products, identify the most relevant audiences, and run ads across the Google Display Network that are tailored to that audience using the industry’s most powerful segmentation capabilities.

Periscopix created 20 highly focused lists of visitors who demonstrated intent but did not purchase. Specifically, lists were based on various aspects of user context such as location, language, and what stage of the purchase funnel they were in. On-site behavior helped establish groups that had spent a certain amount of time on the site or had viewed a certain number of pages. Other lists were created around users who had viewed a specific watch brand on the site.

Additionally, traffic performance analysis across a variety of GA dimensions revealed that certain ISP’s in the London financial district yielded traffic with much higher engagement and above average conversion rates. As a result, Periscopix designed segments around investment banks like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to engage with employees at these companies.


Google Analytics’ functionality enabled Periscopix to convey tailored messages to these key groups of interested consumers. For example, London-based users were retargeted with ads encouraging visits to the new London store, while visitors to the .co.uk site from France were retargeted with ads promoting the French site. 

Time well spent
Thanks to clear reporting in Google Analytics, it’s been easy to see the impressive results from Watchfinders’ remarketing campaign. Six months in, Periscopix reveals the return on investment is 1300%. Average order value on the site has also increased by 13%, resulting in 34% lower CPAs than Watchfinder’s non-brand search campaigns. 

Across all tactics used, the remarketing list that produced the highest conversion rates, both in terms of goals and transactions, was made up of visitors who browsed for 10 minutes or more on their initial site visit without purchasing.

Given Watchfinder's early success with Remarketing with Google Analytics across the Google Display Network, the brand is excited to increase investment in this area going forward.

Be sure to check out the whole case study here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Zillow uses Google Analytics Premium to make data-driven decisions

Google Analytics Premium lets Zillow grow and scale their company.

“A host of functions at Zillow use Google Analytics every day… Marketing, business intelligence, design, engineering and usability are using it to drive product decisions, user experience decisions, and business decisions.”
- Jeremy Wacksman, VP Marketing at Zillow

Zillow is the home and real estate marketplace that helps people share vital information about home values, rentals, mortgages and a lot more. Zillow was founded in 2005 and now has over 110 million U.S. homes in its living database. (That name? A combination of “zillions of data points” and the pillows where happy homeowners rest their heads.)
Recently we sat down with Jeremy Wacksman, Zillow’s VP of Marketing, to learn how they’ve been using Google Analytics Premium to help them grow at such an amazing pace. Here’s what he told us:



This comment stands out: “As an Internet company that has reinvented itself as a mobile-first business, analytics across devices is a big challenge for us.”  

A lot of companies are reinventing themselves for mobile today, and we’ve been working hard to make sure Google Analytics Premium can help them measure all those new cross-device journeys. The goal, as always, is to help businesses gather meaningful data, easily discover insights that they can act upon to improve results and boost the bottom line.

Learn more about Google Analytics Premium here.

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Advocate

Klarna tracks third-party iframe with Universal Analytics’ cookieless approach

Klarna is one of the biggest providers in Europe of in-store credit and invoice based payment solutions for the ecommerce sector. The company enables the end-consumer to order and receive products, then pay for them afterwards. Klarna assesses the credit and fraud risk for the  merchant, allowing the merchant to have a zero-friction checkout process – a win-win for the merchant-customer relationship.


Third-party domains pose a problem
Merchants use Klarna’s iframed checkout solution. The iframe is located on the merchant’s domain, but the actual iframe contents are hosted on  Klarna’s own domain. Browsers such as Safari on iPhone and iPad, and later generation desktop browsers such as Internet Explorer 10 prevent  third-party cookies by default. Many analytics solutions rely on the use of cookies though. In order to prevent the loss of nearly all iPhone visits and  many desktop visits, Klarna wanted to address this problem. 

A cookieless approach to the rescue
Working with Google Analytics Certified Partner Outfox, Klarna found exactly what it needed in Universal Analytics, which introduces a set of features that change the way data is collected and organized in Google Analytics accounts. In addition to standard Google Analytics features, Universal Analytics provides new data collection methods, simplified feature configuration, custom dimensions and metrics, and multi-platform tracking.
“Thanks to Universal Analytics we can track the iframe on our merchants’ domains and be sure we get all traffic.”
- David Fock, Vice President Commerce, Klarna

In Klarna’s new cookieless approach, the “storage: none” option was selected in creating the account in Universal Analytics. The checkout iframe meanwhile uses a unique non-personally identifiable ‘client ID’. These measures cause Universal Analytics to disable cookies and instead use the client ID as a session identifier. Because no cookies are in use, browsers that don’t allow for third-party cookies aren’t an issue at all. 

Virtual pageviews are sent on checkout form interactions. Custom dimensions and metrics are used for tagging a visit, with a dimension  indicating which merchant is hosting the iframe, and a metric showing what cart value the user brings to the checkout.

Complete tracking and assured analysis
With Universal Analytics features, Klarna ensures iframe tracking is complete across all browsers. By using the virtual pageviews as URL goals  and funnel steps, goal flow visualizations are used to find bottlenecks in the checkout flow. The new custom dimensions and metrics together with  ecommerce tracking mean that reports can now be set up to reveal how each merchant’s cart value correlates to its final transaction value.

Be sure to check out the whole case study here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

DoubleClick Rich Media Hangout Series: Lessons from our Customers, featuring Project C


In the motion picture industry, you live or die by your movie trailer and your pre-launch advertising. With all the action-packed creative and large-scale campaigns competing in the same space, it’s quite a task to make innovative and attention-grabbing advertisements. Yet creative agency Project C embraces the challenge.

For our third installment in our DoubleClick Rich Media Hangout Series, “Lessons from our Customers”, we’ll be interviewing Project C, next Wednesday, 12/18 @ 2pm ET.

Joey Barrus, Director of Ad Media, Matthew Jordan, Director of Strategy and Production, and Jennifer Christiano, Project C Producer, will chat with Jeff Sundheim, DoubleClick Creative Account Executive, to discuss how they come up with the next big idea for their entertainment clients.

They’ll walk us through how they built the ad creatives for the major motion picture releases Thor, Despicable Me 2, and Anna Karenina, and which tools they used to make the creative come to life. Plus, they may even divulge some stories of Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes antics.

Join us next Wednesday, Dec. 18th @ 2:30pm ET / 11:30am PT.
RSVP for the hangout here.

If, like the rest of us, you’re just counting down the hours until you can leave for Christmas break, here’s some fodder to help you pass the time: Part one and two of our hangout series.

We hope you’ll join us!

How attribution modeling increases profit for Baby Supermall

"Attribution modeling changes everything."

That's what Joe Meier of Baby Supermall told us recently.  If you're looking for alphabets or monkeys on your new baby bedding, Baby Supermall is the place to be. But those products have an unusually long buying cycle. "Our typical customer is a pregnant mother-to-be," says Meier. "They have months to make a decision."

In this video, Meier describes how Google Analytics’ attribution modeling tool let them measure the impact of different marketing touch points before customers finally made a purchase. So they could figure out which of their marketing activities led all those moms (and dads) to visit the Baby Supermall site. It also saved him from the monster 80-megabyte spreadsheets he'd been building as he tried to manually figure those patterns out. 

Result? “We’re spending our money more efficiently than we were before. We know what we’re getting for it,” says Meier. By linking their Google Analytics and Adwords accounts, Baby Supermall was able to see the impact of different keywords and optimize their AdWords ads, bringing in “tens of thousands of dollars in additional sales every week."

He calls the results "groundbreaking." Check out the video:


(PS: Don't miss their site if you happen to like very cute baby bedding.)

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by: Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

Fairmont Gets Deeper Understanding of Social Interactions for Real Results

How do you improve social messaging for some of the world's most prestigious hotels? If you're Fairmont Raffles Hotels, you turn to Google Analytics. 

Fairmont is famous for its nearly 100 global luxury hotels, from the original Raffles Hotel in Singapore to the grand Empress Fairmont in Victoria, B.C.  The variety of the properties can make social impact tricky to measure, says Barbara Pezzi, Director of Analytics & SEO.

Charmingly direct, Pezzi says her team tried other social media analytics tools and found that "the metrics were really lame. Number of likes and retweets — that didn't really tell us anything." They wanted to know exactly who they were attracting and how.

Once the Fairmont team began using Google Analytics, they were able to see their audiences more clearly and tailor messages to fit. The results were impressive: a doubling of bookings and revenue from social media. 

Here's the whole story:



"It was a big revelation for everyone" — when it comes to analytics, those are the magic words.

Learn more about Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium here.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

Intuit Team Crunches its Own Numbers with Google Analytics Premium

Intuit products like Quicken and TurboTax have been putting the power of numbers in the hands of users since 1983.

Which is why we're so pleased that when Intuit wanted to boost the power of analytics for one of their own teams recently, they turned to Google Analytics Premium. The details are in our new case study, which you'll find here.

The study has the full story of Intuit's Channel Marketing Team, which now uses Google Analytics Premium to measure data for multiple business segments. Once they began using it, Intuit discovered that they had been under-reporting the success of their SEO traffic by at least 27% and conversions by up to 200%.  

Those are exactly the kind of vital numbers that Google Analytics Premium is designed to provide.  

Intuit used Blast Analytics and Marketing, a Google Analytics certified partner, to build out their solution, which was configured to match Intuit's own organizational structure. That structure helped Intuit "democratize" its data so that now anyone on the team can get what they need right away, in real time. Instead of the two days it used to take to request and deliver reports, it takes two hours or less.

Simply put, Ken Wach, Vice President of Marketing at Intuit said, “Google Analytics Premium increased the speed and accuracy of actionable data that drives our business.” 


Post by Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

What industry leaders value in a digital marketing platform

-- The following is cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog --

A few months ago, we launched the new version of DFA - DoubleClick Campaign Manager - globally.

The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry. 

We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:
  1. Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
  2. Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.” 
  3. Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”


      With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens. 

      In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions.

      If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

      What industry leaders value in a digital marketing platform

      A few months ago, we launched the new version of DFA - DoubleClick Campaign Manager - globally.

      The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry. 

      We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:
      • Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
      • Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.” 
      • Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”


        With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens. 

        In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions.

        If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.