Owned by the Norwegian entrepreneur and billionaire Petter Stordalen, Nordic Choice Hotels is one of the largest hotel chains in the Nordics. The Nordic Choice Hotels group has over 190 hotels across the region, including brands such as Clarion hotel, Quality hotel, and Comfort hotel. eBerry is a tech subsidiary started with the purpose of driving digitalization and technical innovation for the Nordic Choice Hotels group.
The Problem
Patrik and his team are competing not only against other hotels but also against online travel agents like Booking.com and Hotels.com. These players provide the same product, hotel rooms, but since they can aggregate multiple hotel chains they have a wider inventory. In order to sell as much as possible directly through the Nordic Choice Hotels website and reduce distribution costs, the eBerry team has to outperform the aforementioned digital giants in the digital marketing space. The team also has to perform against hard targets regarding profitability and revenue growth.
For eBerry, that means advertising across a vast number of digital channels, with constant measurement and optimization.
Collecting advertising data meant daily manual labor
With Nordic Choice Hotels’ big advertising budget and many advertising channels, a cross-channel and cross-market performance overview is crucial. Patrik needed to get a daily report of yesterday’s figures. So one of the team members would regularly have to log in to each advertising account in order to collect cost data, clicks, and impressions. They would log in to the Norwegian Trivago account, select dates and metrics, and export them into a spreadsheet. Then repeat the process with the Trivago account for Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and other markets, followed by 10 other advertising channels, for a total of 35+ advertising accounts. Finally, they would match that cost data with transaction data from Google Analytics, and create a report showing the Cost of Sale and other metrics per campaign. In order to stay on top of a vast advertising operation and meet profitability targets, this process had to be repeated every morning.
Not only were they spending too much time on data collection - the report wasn’t ready until lunch, wasting half a day of optimization.
Currency mismatch
Currencies further complicated the process. Working across the Nordic Choice Hotels, advertising is done in multiple currencies in different advertising accounts. So in order to compare apples to apples, they had to convert these currencies on a daily basis.
The Solution
Automated data collection and reporting
Patrik used Funnel to automate the collection of advertising data from all his ad platforms and from Google Analytics, and his cross-channel performance report is now ready whenever he logs in. Cost of Sale is automatically calculated and updated in an overview dashboard. Currency conversion is automated, and he can now compare campaigns across all his markets.
Every morning Patrik logs into Funnel to overview the live numbers on Cost of Sale per channel, giving him an opportunity to deep-dive in the right areas right after his morning coffee. And his team can forget about data entry.
“Funnel support is amazing. They are easy to reach, and help me quickly when I need it.”
“Whether your business is retail or hospitality, as long as you work across markets and advertising accounts - you can’t run a business without Funnel.”
