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Executive summary:
When Anthropologie’s digital marketing data volumes outgrew their manual processing capabilities, reporting delays began to hinder strategic decision-making. By adopting Funnel to automate data aggregation and structure campaign reporting, the marketing team gained the ability to self-serve insights without writing SQL. This shift reduced meeting preparation time from hours to minutes and fostered a new level of trust with the finance team, ultimately securing additional budget to drive growth.
Key results:
- Reduced reporting prep time for cross-functional meetings from hours to minutes.
- Allows marketing team to self-serve insights and be active in data preparation process
- Provided the finance team with accurate, accessible visibility into ad spend and performance, securing more budget as a result
Company profile:
Anthropologie, part of the Urban Outfitters portfolio, is a global lifestyle brand offering a mix of women's apparel, accessories, home furnishings, and beauty products. Since opening its first doors in 1992, the brand has expanded to over 200 stores worldwide. Driven by a strong retail presence and a growing digital footprint, Anthropologie generates in excess of $2 billion in revenue annually.
The challenge: Overcoming the manual bottlenecks
For Anthropologie, like all other retailers, the pandemic led to a massive pivot to digital channels. With more budget and sales moving online, the marketing team struggled with expanding data volumes and the ongoing need to connect the dots across platforms to showcase impact.
As Leah Spalding, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at Anthropologie, recalls: "We didn’t have the infrastructure to look at the granular details we needed. If we tried to pull together all the data in one place, it would basically crash from a processing standpoint."
This lack of processing power directly conflicted with the company's data-driven culture. Anthropologie maintains high standards for communicating the cause and effect of marketing to finance and leadership teams to justify further investments.
"The need for data has always been there, but as the business grew, the pressure to communicate the 'why' behind our strategy increased astronomically," Leah explains. "Turning around an answer used to take four days because we’d spend all that time just pulling and marrying data across channels."
The solution: Automating data for custom, granular reporting
To fix this, the marketing team mapped out their requirements. They needed a platform that could handle increasing marketing data volumes and join data across platforms. They also needed the ability to break out performance across campaigns based on their proprietary reporting structure.
Leah continues: "We were looking for a way to break out performance by specific tactics, like separating middle funnel ads from lower funnel ads, where the expectations for ROAS and conversion are completely different. We needed a tool that could handle that level of detail."
The ability to communicate strategically with other departments was just as critical. "We needed to be able to speak the same language as our partners in merchandising and finance. They are very much in their own data, and we needed to be able to bring our KPIs to the table and stay strategically aligned."
When looking for a way out of this data bottleneck, the team didn't have to look far. Their sister brand under the URBN portfolio, Free People, was already using Funnel to solve these exact marketing data aggregation challenges. Seeing a proven solution already working within their own corporate ecosystem gave Anthropologie the confidence to get straight to work.
The results: Reducing prep time from hours to minutes and securing more budget
Funnel immediately removed the technical bottleneck for the marketing team. Because the platform requires no SQL knowledge, marketers like Leah can now troubleshoot data and build custom dimensions themselves. This shift did not just help marketing; it had a positive ripple effect across the organization.
"Funnel has given our marketing team true independence," notes Maria Romero, Project Manager in Anthropologie's Marketing Analytics team. "Because they can now answer their own questions directly in the platform, it prevents our analytics team from being overwhelmed with ad hoc reporting requests. Ultimately, it has perfected the partnership between analytics and marketing."
With the data centralized, the time required to report on performance dropped drastically.
"It has completely changed the way we walk into meetings," Leah explains. "It used to take hours of prep for a 30 minute meeting just to make sure we knew what was going on. Now, it takes minutes. We are better partners to the business because we actually have a handle on the data."
This speed and clarity ultimately bridged the gap between marketing and leadership, proving the value of their digital investments.
"The trust our finance team has in the marketing team has grown exponentially. Because we can answer their questions in real time and provide full visibility into our spending, they have given us more dollars to grow the business."
