Skyscanner is a leading global travel search company covering flights, hotels, and car hire around the world. Founded in 2003, the company helps over 40 million people each month find the best travel options across its portfolio of websites and mobile apps.

Skyscanner wanted to understand the anonymized behaviour of consumers on a more granular level than was possible via standard reports in the Google Analytics Premium web interface or even using the reporting APIs.

“These methods work well for high-level analysis and standard marketing reporting, but we were keen to dig deeper into the data to get more insight and further optimise our products,” explains Mark Shilton, Principal Analyst in the Skyscanner Data Team.

For example, the company wanted to create detailed cohorts to understand how users interacted with Skyscanner over time. Also, different teams in the business were keen to understand the performance of individual pieces of functionality that fell within their remit.

To do this, they needed to understand not just the overall conversion rate, but how users who interact with a given piece of functionality convert compared to those who do not. Skyscanner also wanted drill down into specific markets, devices types, and marketing channels.

Mapping a plan for deeper insights

Skyscanner opted to address all of these needs by integrating Google Analytics Premium with BigQuery. The integration has become the starting point for many detailed investigations across the business.

For example, analysts and engineers now run cohort analyses to understand how frequently users return to Skyscanner and which channels are most effective at which part of the customer journey.

“This type of analysis is allowing a much deeper understanding of our marketing activity and is informing our future strategy and spend,” Mark says.

He reveals that using BigQuery in conjunction with other tools such as Tableau and Python also helps Skyscanner execute analysis much more quickly and efficiently than before.

“While in the past it was tricky to get a fully unsampled report based on specific segments of users flowing directly from Google Analytics Premium into a Tableau dashboard, now it is simply a matter of writing the query, creating a connection in Tableau to automatically refresh the data daily, and publishing this dashboard to the rest of the company.”

Another key benefit of using a flexible combination of tools is the ability to keep an eye on costs.

“Where the aggregations and segments of data are required on a regular basis, we have to consider the potential cost of querying the entire BigQuery dataset multiple times for the same data,” Mark explains. “To minimise this, we use Python scripts to automate these aggregations into new, smaller tables that are much more cost efficient to query.”

Excellent visibility and a clear path ahead

Combining Google Analytics Premium with BigQuery has supercharged Skyscanner’s ability to turn raw data into deep understanding of consumer behaviour.

“We have been using BigQuery for various pieces of analysis, from one-off investigations to powering daily dashboards,” Mark affirms. “In all cases it has speeded up our workflow and enabled us to gain greater insight more quickly. In a fast moving internet economy, this is key. Instead of setting up and scheduling one or more unsampled API reports, analysts can now write a query against BigQuery and have results almost instantly.”

“BigQuery has also allowed us to more easily isolate the effects of marketing from the effects of site changes,” Mark says. “By writing queries that focus on the conversion rate from specific pages in the funnel, we can better segment our traffic. We can separate traffic from various sources, including: specific marketing campaigns, users who make it to specific parts of the funnel, or users who interact with new functionality. This greater understanding has played a key role in improving overall conversion rates on our websites, particularly on mobile where we’ve achieved conversion rate improvements of 30 to 40% on smartphone and tablet devices in the last six months.”

Looking to the future, Skyscanner’s next steps include exploring how this data can be used to segment, cluster, and classify users for machine learning analyses, which would not have been possible using standard reporting functionality.

In 2006, online travel agency redBus introduced internet bus ticketing in India, unifying tens of thousands of bus schedules into a single booking operation. (Think of it as Expedia for bus booking.) Using BigQuery, redBus crunches terabytes of booking and inventory data in mere seconds and at a fraction of the cost of other big data services. BigQuery also helps engineers fix glitches quickly, minimize lost sales, and improve customer service.

Challenge

Executives at the Bangalore-based redBus needed a powerful tool to analyze booking and inventory data across their system of hundreds of bus operators serving more than 10,000 routes. They considered using clusters of Hadoop servers to process the data but decided the system would take too much time to set up and would require a specialized staff to maintain it. It also would not provide the lightning-fast analysis they needed.

“It would have taken at least a couple of hours to analyze anything,” says Pradeep Kumar, a technical architect at redBus. “Crunching very large data sets would have been a day’s job. We needed something more powerful to get the real-time analysis we were looking for.”

Solution

Kumar and his colleagues learned about BigQuery and realized it was the right match for their data processing needs. The web-based service, which enables companies to analyze massive datasets using Google’s data processing infrastructure, is easy to set up and manage since its simple, SQL-like query language doesn’t require complex technology or specialized personnel. It also has low overhead costs.

The redBus team uses BigQuery as part of an intricate data collection and analysis process. Applications hosted on a range of servers continually pump information related to customer searches, seat inventory, and bookings into a centralized data collection system. Engineers upload the data to BigQuery, which provides answers to complex queries within seconds. For example, BigQuery helps redBus staff:

• Learn how many times customers searched for seats and found none or very few available, indicating more seats should be added to a route
• Investigate decreases in bookings and notify engineers if a technical problem is the cause
• Identify server problems by quickly analyzing data related to server activity

Results

BigQuery provides near real-time data analysis capabilities at 20% of the cost of maintaining a complex Hadoop infrastructure. Queries that would have required a day to analyze on a Hadoop framework take less than 30 seconds using Google’s web-based service.

“We explored several data analytics solutions. Nothing comes remotely close to the sheer power of Google BigQuery,” Kumar says. “It made large-scale data collection and crunching possible with little effort, which has translated to a significant business advantage.”

Google Cloud Platform results

• Analyzes data sets as large as 2 terabytes in less than 30 seconds using a simple, SQL-like language
• Saves time analyzing technical problems and customer booking trends
• Spends 80% less than they would have on a Hadoop infrastructure and avoids setting up and maintaining a complex infrastructure in-house
• Strengthens the company by improving customer service and engineering quality

The fast insights gained through BigQuery are also making redBus a stronger company. By minimizing the time it takes staff members to solve technical problems, BigQuery has helped improve customer service and reduce lost sales.

“Getting to the root of problems used to be really time-consuming,” Kumar says. “By the time we figured it out, customers might have given up. Now if there are booking problems, BigQuery helps us understand the reason right away. Choosing Google BigQuery was the right decision for our company.”