Hoff: boosting advertising ROI with Google Cloud
About Hoff
Founded in 2007, Hoff is Russia’s only hypermarket retailer for furniture and household items, providing complete interior design solutions under one roof. The company employs more than 2,000 people and has 25 outlets across Russia serving 5 million people every year, while its website sees over 12 million unique visitors annually. To learn more, visit www.hoff.ru.
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About OWOX
OWOX provides analytics services for multi-channel businesses, helps implement Google Analytics 360 Suite in ecommerce projects and develops online services based on Google Cloud. OWOX BI helps automate data collection and processing in Google BigQuery, evaluate advertising campaigns based on a customer journey inside the sales funnel and easily get answers to a variety of business questions. OWOX is a certified partner of Google Analytics and Google Cloud, being the first authorized Google Analytics 360 reseller in the EMEA region. To learn more, visit www.owox.com.
With Google Cloud, Hoff was able to gather unprecedented data on customer behaviour, build new revenue attribution models and optimize its online marketing strategy.
Google Cloud results
- Increased online advertising ROI by 17% with powerful analysis in Google BigQuery
- Integrated Google Cloud Storage data easily with internal analytics platform
- Saved resources on DevOps and IT support staff with cloud-based infrastructure
Offering comprehensive interior design solutions, Hoff is Russia’s only hypermarket retailer of furniture and household items, with 5 million customers a year in its stores and more than 12 million unique visitors to its website every year. As Hoff’s online presence grew, the company knew it needed to overhaul its analytics. To do that it needed Google Cloud.
By putting its high-powered analysis into practice, Hoff increased its online advertising ROI by 17%.
“Our main goal was to improve our online analytics which were quite patchy before. Now all our data is stored in Google BigQuery from multiple sources like online activities, call center orders or sales from the physical stores. Before, it was difficult to bring all this information together but now practically every person in our online division has access to it. It’s very easy to analyze it all in just a few clicks.”
—Andrey Kolesnichecko, Analyst, Hoff“We wanted to know more about how our online and offline activities are connected, how our online advertising could affect offline sales, for example,” says Andrey Kolesnichecko, Analyst at Hoff. “We knew that people go to the site, we spend money advertising to them, then they might go to the physical store and buy something but we couldn’t connect these sales to our online data. So we partnered with OWOX to create a new end-to-end analytics system with Google Cloud.”
Maximum performance, minimum hassle with Google BigQuery
For large retail companies with multiple sales channels, keeping track of customers is vital. In 2016, Hoff set out to overhaul its existing revenue attribution models and optimize its online marketing strategy. The company planned to link its online and offline customers, research the effectiveness of its advertising campaigns and automate its bid adjustments for Price Per Click (PPC) advertising. Hoff turned to leading analytics and BI specialists at OWOX to come up with a solution.
OWOX and Hoff leveraged the power and ease of use of Google Cloud to create a platform that could collect, analyze and export the data simply and quickly. With OWOX BI Pipeline, Hoff imported data from multiple sources into Google BigQuery, the heart of the new analytics platform. Google BigQuery’s ease of use meant that Hoff could reap the benefits of its powerful performance without having to hire extra DevOps or IT support staff. With the attribution results saved in Google Google Cloud Storage, Hoff could easily export it and automate its advertising bids to minimize costs. In addition, the OWOX BI Pipeline can export data in Google Sheets and schedule reports to make sure that the right information got to the right people at the right time. Hoff set up virtual instances on Google Compute Engine for batch processing jobs, freeing resources for its internal servers.
“The main advantage of Google Cloud for us is Google BigQuery. You don't have to think about the configuration of instances or the storage size or anything to do with development. As an analyst, I’m used to dealing with developers and administrators but with Google BigQuery I don’t need any support. It leaves me free to just think about the data.”
—Andrey Kolesnichecko, Analyst, Hoff“We developed custom metrics for the website and analyzed the data in Google BigQuery in order to run new attribution models,” says Alyona Samovar, Digital Analyst at OWOX. “It’s a user-centric approach where we identify individual customers across several channels and devices. The data from these attribution models can then be exported from Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage into a real time bidding platform to automatically change bids.”
High power analysis, high impact results
With Google BigQuery and the OWOX BI Pipeline, Hoff was able to put its new insights into practice and increase its online advertising return on investment by 17%. In addition, Hoff was able to measure the effectiveness of its advertising keywords on customer behaviour. It resulted in discovering new keywords to further increase sales. As Hoff looks ahead to the future, it has started experimenting with Google Cloud’s machine learning APIs to optimize its analytics and stay at the top of its game.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Hoff
Founded in 2007, Hoff is Russia’s only hypermarket retailer for furniture and household items, providing complete interior design solutions under one roof. The company employs more than 2,000 people and has 25 outlets across Russia serving 5 million people every year, while its website sees over 12 million unique visitors annually. To learn more, visit www.hoff.ru.
About OWOX
OWOX provides analytics services for multi-channel businesses, helps implement Google Analytics 360 Suite in ecommerce projects and develops online services based on Google Cloud. OWOX BI helps automate data collection and processing in Google BigQuery, evaluate advertising campaigns based on a customer journey inside the sales funnel and easily get answers to a variety of business questions. OWOX is a certified partner of Google Analytics and Google Cloud, being the first authorized Google Analytics 360 reseller in the EMEA region. To learn more, visit www.owox.com.