EPROFESSIONAL: Turning data into business value with a 360° marketing view on Google Cloud
About EPROFESSIONAL
EPROFESSIONAL creates and empowers digital masters. Founded in 1999, the Hamburg-based digital marketing agency supports leading brands and international corporations with data and technology-driven marketing initiatives and strategy consulting. Notable customers include Vodafone, L’Oréal, AIDA, and Hugo Boss.
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Contact usEPROFESSIONAL builds an extended data value chain on Google Cloud, boosting the success of campaigns with a 360° marketing view, while saving hundreds of hours and doubling developer productivity.
Google Cloud results
- Boosts KPI-driven campaign performance with a Google Cloud-powered 360° view on all marketing activities of customers
- Doubles developer productivity while reducing time spent on manual reports with automated data value chain
- Increases customer satisfaction with Looker, providing data insights 24/7 and easily personalized dashboards with custom features
- Delivers faster insights while reducing reporting errors by implementing a single source of truth for data with BigQuery
- Empowers customers by providing advanced analytical insights and state-of-the-art machine learning with BigQueryML
360° view on marketing data, 24/7, 365 days a year
Marketing your business is all about connecting with people at the right time, in the right place. Because these places are increasingly digital, business success now heavily relies on successful digital marketing efforts. But to always be a step ahead of the competition, companies need more than digital tools: to wield them, they need digital masters. And those are made, not born.
EPROFESSIONAL is a digital marketing agency that strives to empower its customers to become digital masters. Based in Hamburg, the Axel Springer subsidiary is one of Germany’s most experienced digital agencies and has been providing data-driven marketing services to small and large businesses since 1999.
“Our mission is to level up our customers, from wherever their starting point is, to become digital masters,” explains Dr. Björn Hardrat, Lead Data Scientist at EPROFESSIONAL. “By combining expertise in technology and media with a strategic approach, we’re acting as a trusted in-house full service partner for all things digital media marketing.”
“With time, our on-premises infrastructure simply became too complex to handle. We also need to meet strict compliance standards, such as GDPR, which became increasingly difficult. We wanted to reduce complexity and simplify development, without compromising on security, which led us to Google Cloud.”
—Daniel Buch, Strategic Manager, Chapter Lead Cloud Solutions, EPROFESSIONALEmpowering digital masters
To make digital masters, it takes digital masters, and being an expert at EPROFESSIONAL means being on top of your game. It also means being digitally versatile and selecting best-in-class technology solutions that support this flexibility: “Our customers usually come with their own tech stacks, and those can be quite complex and diverse,” explains Dr. Hardrat. “That’s why we need adaptable technology solutions we can easily implement with the technology products of our customers.”
Data is at the heart of EPROFESSIONAL’s digital marketing initiatives, but while gathering huge amounts of data is easy, making it secure, compliant, and easily accessible is not. In the past, the company used its own on-premises big data infrastructure, which started holding back progress due to its complexity.
“With time, our on-premises infrastructure simply became too complex to handle,” explains Daniel Buch, Strategic Manager, Chapter Lead Cloud Solutions at EPROFESSIONAL. “We also need to meet strict compliance standards, such as GDPR, which became increasingly difficult. We wanted to reduce complexity and simplify development, without compromising on security, which led us to Google Cloud.”
“With our old setup, even getting to the data was challenging, let alone activating it and moving it around between our services,” adds Dr. Hardrat. “What stood out about Google Cloud is how easy it is to tap into your data and leverage it to the full extent, whether that’s in your machine learning models or our marketing tools, such as the Google Marketing Platform.”
360 degree view, 365 days a year
In around eight months, EPROFESSIONAL built an extended data value chain with Google Cloud solutions. Data from different marketing sources, which was formerly locked in silos and gathered in error-prone Excel reports that had to be manually updated, is now part of a holistic data lake. This helps EPROFESSIONAL deliver more value, faster, with its data-driven marketing campaigns.
Here’s how it works: data is collected from tools such as Adobe Analytics or Facebook Ads with App Engine-powered API connectors. The data is stored on Cloud Storage and ETL-processed with Dataflow. Processed data is stored on BigQuery data marts, which are connected to Looker for business intelligence and analytics features. To orchestrate all these processes, EPROFESSIONAL uses Pub/Sub.
By standardizing processes with Google Cloud, EPROFESSIONAL can easily transform, analyze, and visualize raw data coming from different marketing sources. “With BigQuery and Looker, we can provide a single source of truth for the entire company,” explains Buch. “This gives us a 360-degree view on all marketing activities of our customers.”
“Our customers love that they can access their campaign data any time with Looker and be sure that all the data is correct and fully up to date. And by incorporating better data in our prediction models, we’ve been able to significantly improve campaign KPIs, which really drives success for our customers.”
—Christoph Cunanan, Strategic Lead Google Marketing, EPROFESSIONALDriving campaign success with anytime data access
Every data insight can impact the bottom line of EPROFESSIONAL’s customers. With the new, Google Cloud-powered data pipeline, insights are more plentiful and accessible, and less likely to contain errors. Previously, when data reports were created manually, they were released weekly or even monthly, and each iteration had to be meticulously checked for errors. Today, they’re available 24/7, enabling more timely and informed decisions.
“Our customers love that they can access their campaign data any time with Looker and be sure that all the data is correct and fully up to date,” explains Christoph Cunanan, Strategic Lead Google Marketing at EPROFESSIONAL. “And by incorporating better data in our prediction models, we’ve been able to significantly improve campaign KPIs, by accurately forecasting budgets and performance KPIs, which really drives success for our customers.”
No two customers are the same, and EPROFESSIONAL’s new data value chain makes it easy to adapt reports and dashboards to different needs. “Building custom solutions for our customers used to be time consuming,” says Cunanan. “With flexible data access and customizable dashboards on Google Cloud and Looker, it’s become much easier and faster for us to provide custom features, from machine-learning-based predictions and forecasts and additional customer-specific data sources to a full omnichannel view on all marketing data, our customers really value.”
Doubling productivity, saving 100s of hours
Thanks to automated and standardized processes, EPROFESSIONAL can deliver more value to customers with less effort. Because Looker can visualize all the data in custom dashboards, developers no longer need to create customer-facing front ends, and repetitive tasks such as report creation are a thing of the past. As a result, EPROFESSIONAL’s developer team has doubled productivity. “We’re much faster and can provide the same or even better levels of service with a development team half the size,” says Buch.
EPROFESSIONAL’s digital masters pass these efficiency gains on to their customers by using time formerly spent on repetitive tasks to really generate value from their data. “Time spent on report creation is time our campaign managers can’t spend optimizing campaigns,” says Dr. Hardrat. “By automating this process with Google Cloud, we’re saving hundreds of hours per month, and we can invest all that time into our BI stack to help customers really stay on top of the game.”
“When you’re striving to be a digital master, you’re never really done learning, there are always new projects to tackle, new improvements to make. With Google Cloud, we can be ahead of the curve and tackle these challenges head on. The possibilities are endless, and we’re ready to explore.”
—Dr. Björn Hardrat, Lead Data Scientist, EPROFESSIONALSolving future challenges, today
When it comes to the company’s core mission of empowering digital masters, EPROFESSIONAL is leading by example. Many of the company’s customers already use cloud services or are very interested in them, and EPROFESSIONAL’s own successes are just a taste of what’s next—helping customers become digital masters themselves.
Besides new perspectives, EPROFESSIONAL’s new 360-degree marketing view has also brought new foresight when it comes to future challenges. As media and technology become increasingly intertwined, markets will change, and issues of privacy will become paramount. For all these challenges to come, EPROFESSIONAL has found the right partner.
“When you’re striving to be a digital master, you’re never really done learning, there are always new projects to tackle, new improvements to make,” says Dr. Hardrat. “With Google Cloud, we can be ahead of the curve and tackle these challenges head on. The possibilities are endless, and we’re ready to explore.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About EPROFESSIONAL
EPROFESSIONAL creates and empowers digital masters. Founded in 1999, the Hamburg-based digital marketing agency supports leading brands and international corporations with data and technology-driven marketing initiatives and strategy consulting. Notable customers include Vodafone, L’Oréal, AIDA, and Hugo Boss.