Service: Deep Dive Data & Data Science

The explosion of tablet and smartphone usage in recent years has not only revolutionised the way we shop, but has increased the need for speed in data analysis.

Challenge

In order to enhance and extend the reach of its offering, a leading retailer introduced a brand new iPad app. Having launched the new app, the business needed to validate its initial design choices and to quickly gather information on how the app was being used. This would enable them to make specific modifications that would guarantee the best consumer experience and the highest levels of engagement.

Eager to isolate and act on any areas for improvement, the business was keen to understand how the new app’s functionality was impacting customer behaviour. The challenge was to gather all the intelligence required to make such enhancements, quickly, to ensure that the project could advance in the most cost-effective manner and the new app could be improved immediately.

Since this was a new app on a new platform, the company was also keen to identify first-time customers, but more importantly to locate those transitioning from other platforms. They needed to ascertain if this migration was creating new business or simply cannibalising existing traffic.

Solution

Station10 was engaged to collate, evaluate and deliver all the necessary information required to make essential design and development decisions. By extracting and combining the company’s individual datasets (for each platform) and working closely with the product managers to identify key functional points of difference between the new app and previous platforms, we were able to explain how the new app’s functionality was impacting customer behaviour.

From this, we built a complete multi-channel view of customers that were using the app, and isolated cohorts of similar users, to determine if and how their behaviours changed when they transitioned to the new app. The analysis also established whether those changes were positive or negative, in order to determine if any modifications needed to be made.

The rapidly evolving retail sector demands that app developments and improvements be made fast if they are to be effective. This means that the insights required to make such decisions need to be accessed immediately.

To offer the retailer this vital intelligence in a short space of time, our analysis was carried out over the course of two fortnight-long sprints. Interim findings were presented back to the stakeholders on a regular basis, and a final presentation was distributed at the end. This meant that decision-makers could begin to think about improvements straight away and the project could move swiftly forward to deliver maximum ROI.

Business Benefits

The unified cross-channel consumer view that emerged from the two-week-long insight sprints, gave the retailer a clear understanding of who was engaging with the new app – and in what ways. This equipped the retailer with a better understanding of its consumer and of his or her needs, and provided the following business benefits:

• More informed decision making
• Pertinent questions resolved
• Identification of issues and opportunities around engagement, revealing modifications that could be made to encourage conversion
• Improvements specifically targeted to consumer needs
• Identification of users with abandoned baskets for the purpose of retargeting via marketing
• Validation of the new app’s effectiveness leading to its deployment across other platforms

The Background

UKTV, the digital broadcaster, wanted to get more out of its analytics on its digital platform.  There were key metrics for the business which they could not report for their digital platform.  This was partly due to their implementation – not all the events had been tagged in the right way – but also due to the analytics solution they had.  Standard metrics for digital video tracking are based around the proportion of video that has been watched.  That’s generally fine for video clips and 30-second ads, but not if you are a broadcaster with hour-long TV shows, and their associated ad slots, to measure.

As a result, UKTV required a more comprehensive solution.  They had Google Analytics, but Adobe Analytics, and in particular the Heartbeat methodology it employs for tracking video, offered the capability to provide the level of insight they needed, delivering a unified platform across the range of UKTV platforms on the web, TV apps and mobile apps.

However, this still represented a significant investment for UKTV.  Station10 worked alongside the UKTV stakeholders to establish the business case for the tool and the required services to ensure it was set up correctly.

What Station10 did

The Heartbeat tracking method sends an analytics call every 10 seconds, rather than at predefined milestones in the video.  This provides a more granular view of the status of the video than other analytics methods, allowing more detailed understanding of usage and viewing behaviour.  For a broadcaster, this is crucial; it also has the advantage of being able to capture additional data types like buffering and errors, which might not be recorded in other ways.

However, such a method also presents significant technical challenges for the implementation; it is sending many more calls during the video, and clearly cannot impact and slow down the viewing experience. In particular, this was a challenge on the tv apps which not only are often running on low-power set-top boxes but also include a variety of apps and video players.  This required a best practice implementation approach that ensured performance and consistency across all platforms.  Based on Station10’s many years of analytics experience, we established the common requirements across the different viewing platforms and then designed the data layer, video event layer and tag management approach for the implementation phase.

Station10 then implemented and configured the analytics set-up.  In doing so, we worked very closely alongside UKTV’s development team; this was vital, as it enabled both teams to communicate and overcome the specific technical challenges that emerged from time to time – apps can be sensitive and getting the analytics running required some fine tweaking of the code.

Results

UKTV’s Adobe Analytics Heartbeat analytics went live seamlessly in May 2017.  This was the very first Heartbeat implementation on the Adobe platform in the UK, meaning UKTV is leading the way in digital video analytics in the highly competitive media marketplace in the UK.  Moreover, it immediately started providing insights based on its more granular data capture method, particularly around how viewers consume the content.  For instance, this has already enabled UKTV to deliver much more detail about ad consumption to their advertisers than was previously possible, as well as better understanding the impact of adverts on viewing behaviour.

UKTV’s Head of Analytics, Rohini Sarkar, said “As UKTV ramps up its digital footprint it was essential we are able to track all aspects of the consumer experience. Station10 were invaluable in ensuring our needs were met and with our enhanced tracking, we are confident our consumers are already seeing the benefit. I would highly recommend Station10, they understood our culture and addressed all our requirements seamlessly”.