ABA English is an award-winning online English academy based in Spain that teaches the English language by transferring the mother-tongue learning technique to the digital space. Based on films specially designed to learn English, interactive exercises, and guidance from a private tutor, the learning experience on the ABA course is effective, flexible, and natural.
With millions of customers using their website and mobile app in over 170 countries around the world, it’s no surprise ABA English was chosen as the best educational app by Reimagine Education Awards.
Limited resources for data collection
Before discovering Funnel, Helena, the Head of Insights at ABA English would spend over two hours each day collecting and maintaining the data from a large number of accounts across different platforms and markets. After downloading individual spreadsheets for each account, she then needed to create Excel formulas to aggregate the data. On top of that, Helena also noticed that the data from marketing platforms such as Facebook and Google Ads would change retroactively, meaning she also needed to spend time updating the historical data. This inevitably led to discrepancies between the data from the ad platforms and their spreadsheet reports.
Once the data had been collected for a given day, the insights team then needed to manually convert the cost from multiple markets into Euros and attribute this to the data in their backend system. All this time could have been spent on data analysis, but instead was wasted on data collection, cleaning, and preparation.
Maintaining custom scripts
Helena quickly realized that the process they had in place simply wasn’t sustainable. She knew that in order to increase efficiency they needed to automate the data collection and aggregation process. The insights team tried to create custom scripts for each of their marketing platforms but found that the majority of their time was spent managing, troubleshooting, and updating the connections. Due to limited resources, they decided to revert to collecting the data manually until they found a better solution. That’s when they discovered Funnel.
A centralized data hub
Since starting with Funnel in 2016 the data collection and aggregation process has no longer been an issue. Helena and her team were able to find and connect all of their marketing platforms within minutes of obtaining their Funnel login. She was also able to activate automatic currency conversion and normalize metrics across their marketing platforms. This saved the insights team over 2 hours per day which gave them more time to focus on analyzing keyword performance and app engagement.
It was now easy to schedule automatic exports to their Data Warehouse, Amazon Redshift, in order to attribute their app installs, interactions and revenue, creating a centralized data hub. This then enabled ABA English to connect their Redshift account to Chartio for visualization and reporting.
The ability to identify underperforming platforms
The insights team wasn’t the only department to benefit from the new process. Now that their data was centralized it was easy for the marketing team to see how their marketing cost was trending towards their budget, without waiting for the insights team to collect and map the data. This led to smarter campaign optimization and the ability to identify underperforming platforms.
“Funnel has saved my life!”
