Early Birds: Seamlessly absorbing increases of 50–300% in web traffic
About Early Birds
Founded in Paris in 2012, Early Birds records a 15% increase in turnover every month. The company is currently undergoing international expansion and works for major distribution brands (Fnac, Darty, Carrefour, Celio, Nature et Découvertes, Showroomprivé, and La Redoute). Its services are used in around fifteen countries.
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Contact usGoogle Cloud results:
- Instantly absorbs large increases in traffic generated by new customers or sale seasons
- Speeds up the development of new algorithms
- Frees up administration time thanks to managed services
The data flow processed by Early Birds can triple instantly. This happens particularly at the beginning of sale seasons or when a large group such as Fnac or Darty becomes one of the company's clients. As a result, Google Cloud was the obvious choice for Early Birds, which specializes in real-time personalization of customer journeys.
Products tailored to each internet user
To predict expected consumer behavior, Early Birds uses algorithms that are carefully developed by the company itself, its clients, or third parties.
"We help major retailers to increase the conversion rate of their e-commerce sites by between 3% and 15%," says Nicolas Mathon, co-founder and associate director.In order to do this, Early Birds analyzes a range of data, including clickstream data provided by retailers (the pages visited, time spent on a product page, and any subsequent actions); what the internet user is interested in (frequently visited sections, notifications, wish lists, and data from social networks); the conversion funnel (add-to-cart rates, purchases, returns, abandoned carts, etc.); and in-store purchases and telephone orders.
With Early Birds' application program interfaces (APIs), merchandisers and product managers can customize up to 90% of the content on their retail website, tailoring it to the type of consumers currently browsing the site. Early Birds' recommendation engine dynamically determines relevant recommendations, depending on the consumers' tastes and preferences, and places them in defined areas in accordance with the brands.
"Thanks to Google Cloud, we process an average of 600 predictions per second at any given time, reaching up to 2,000 per second in sale seasons. We optimize the potential of customer data in real time," says Nicolas.From virtual servers to managed services and predictive analytics
Early Birds has been a Google Cloud customer since 2013 and originally used Compute Engine to test its algorithms and analyze its consumers' histories, Cloud Storage to complete its automatic backups, Cloud CDN to display personalized content relevant to the consumer on a country-by-country basis and in near real time, and Cloud Load Balancing to optimize load distribution between the Hadoop/Spark virtual servers.
"Our technical infrastructure has been hosted by Google for several years. We never would have been able to expand at this pace with our own servers," explains Nicolas.In 2016, Early Birds moved up a gear by using Google Cloud's managed services. "10% of our employees used to work on installation, administration, and maintenance tasks. We decided to outsource these functions so we could concentrate more on our area of expertise: algorithms," he adds. For developments, Early Birds uses Dataproc and Dataflow managed services, activating just a few servers or dozens, on demand, depending on the complexity of the algorithm tested.
Alongside managed services, Early Birds completely overhauled its decision architecture in 2016. The company transferred all of its databases to Cloud Bigtable and began using BigQuery for its predictive calculations. "Our SQL queries were running too slowly for the amount of data we were processing. Now, our experts can simulate conversion funnels in just a few seconds, enabling our customers to benefit from this valuable information."
Pub/Sub is now at the heart of the API management platform, recording all interactions and events triggered by consumers. Moreover, thanks to Pub/Sub, Early Birds can now offer its customers the opportunity to develop their own APIs within the company's technical environment (framework).
"We have not found anything that can rival Google Cloud and match it in terms of performance or reliability. Google knows how to mask the complexity of its technologies. We are making the most of its power while retaining transparent services and a reliable infrastructure. Google is also a huge innovator in terms of algorithms and artificial intelligence. We are interested in its new Cloud Spanner technology for our future international expansion. It will make it easier to manage our APIs across the world," concludes Nicolas.Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Early Birds
Founded in Paris in 2012, Early Birds records a 15% increase in turnover every month. The company is currently undergoing international expansion and works for major distribution brands (Fnac, Darty, Carrefour, Celio, Nature et Découvertes, Showroomprivé, and La Redoute). Its services are used in around fifteen countries.