Executive summary:
trivago, a global metasearch engine, faced challenges with scattered marketing data and manual reporting processes. They adopted Funnel, which streamlined reporting by seamlessly connecting all local search engine accounts. This transition resulted in trivago achieving 100% reporting coverage, saving time, reducing manual work, and boosting team morale. The direct integrations provided timely and trustworthy data, significantly improving marketing reporting efficiency.
Key results:
- trivago went from 30% marketing reporting coverage to 100% with Funnel.
- Significant time savings due to centralized data management.
- Boosted team morale through alleviating manual and tedious work.
Company profile:
trivago is a metasearch engine that streamlines the comparison of accommodation deals from multiple booking websites, featuring over 2.5 million properties across 190 countries. trivago stands out for its neutral facilitation of choice, allowing users to find the best deals without being involved in the booking or payment processes. Headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany, it's powered by a diverse, entrepreneurial team, dedicated to fostering innovation and a user-centric experience for travelers and partners around the globe.
The challenge - Blind spots across marketing activities
Global companies inevitably run into challenges with marketing data being scattered across a multitude of platforms. When expanding beyond the largest platforms like Google Ads or Meta Ads, it’s easy for parts of the marketing budget to disappear into a black hole because it’s such a hassle to properly report on results, especially for smaller platforms.
trivago found themselves in this exact situation, but deemed that it would be too cumbersome and expensive to build automation for reporting on smaller platforms. Instead, the trivago team initially opted for a solution where invoices and reports were manually imported on a daily basis, but only for the larger platforms. Even with this limited scope, the process was time consuming and prone to human errors. In addition, the marketing team was dependent on individual specialists for each country for certain reports, which meant that if someone was absent, the data for that market wouldn't be collected and the reports would be delayed. Also, the challenge remained that trivago had no centralized overview of results outside the largest platforms, which only accounted for around 30% of the marketing platforms trivago uses.
The solution - Moving from manual work to software
At this point, the trivago team started looking at software that could help alleviate the manual work, and that’s when they found Funnel. Shortly after getting started, trivago’s marketing team was able to connect all their local search engine accounts to Funnel, without any manual work or internal developer resources required. Patrick Kool, Product Lead in Marketing Automation at trivago notes that the onboarding to Funnel was a seamless experience: “The setup was really smooth and the support was extremely responsive.”
The results - Getting 100% reporting coverage
Since the vast majority of platforms trivago's work with are supported in Funnel out-of-the-box, the trivago team could simply add the access credentials to each respective platform in order for the data to start flowing. For the more niche local platforms that were not supported out-of-the-box, trivago utilizes Funnel’s development resources through custom connectors to achieve full reporting coverage.
Funnel has helped trivago streamline their reporting process significantly. With direct integrations to their platforms now in place, the data flows to their backend system and is synced with their business intelligence solution automatically. Importantly, it has helped trivago go from 30% to 100% reporting coverage.
This has saved the trivago team significant time, provides more granularity and they no longer need to wait for manual imports. This has in turn produced timely cost reports and importantly for trivago, boosted team morale. Patrick Kool reflects on the impact of implementing Funnel has had on his own day-to-day and that of his team: “I can trust the data without logging into the local platforms.”
Ready to enhance your reporting capabilities and make more informed marketing choices? Get in touch with us to find out how Funnel can empower your strategy.
