HONOR: Effectively enhancing online marketing performance with predictive analytics powered by BigQuery
About Honor
HONOR is a smart end device provider headquartered in China offering top-selling smartphones, tablets and wearable devices to consumers around the world. Prioritizing innovation, the company has more than 60% of its staff dedicated to R&D and will soon launch its own cloud service. In 2022, HONOR's overseas sales growth reached more than 200%.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About TrueMetrics
Founded in 2012, TrueMetrics is a Google Marketing Platform partner and Google Cloud resale and service partner, as well as a data consulting service and solution provider of the Google One ecosystem. With its branch offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Singapore, TrueMetrics offers comprehensive solutions ranging from data tool implementation, data training, data visualization, data analytics to data integration consulting, supporting Chinese brands' overseas business across industries, including retail, high tech, consumer product manufacturing, games, and air travel.
Leveraging predictive machine learning models in BigQuery to generate ad target audience, HONOR is able to significantly improve its return on ad spend, ad conversion rate and cost per click by realizing effective layered marketing.
Google Cloud results
- Supports seamless integration with Google Analytics and Google Ads
- Enhances ad conversion rate by 33.5% and reduces cost per click by 40.6% through predictive analytics
- Shortens processing time for terabytes of data from one hour to a few minutes with BigQuery
- Enables more efficient ML model optimization with detailed performance metrics
Return on ad spend up by 63%
The smartphone market is a competitive battleground, as leading companies launch new models almost every year. In China, HONOR is a rising smartphone brand that's quickly marking its presence on the global stage. In the first quarter of 2024, HONOR led the Chinese smartphone industry with its 17.1 percent market share. At the same time, the company has been focusing on overseas expansion over the past three years and reached a record high global market share of 5.4 percent in the third quarter of 2023. Currently, HONOR owns more than 3,000 service centers around the world, and its mobile devices are present in more than 100 markets.
HONOR has been heavily investing in innovation, with more than 60 percent of its staff dedicated to research and development. Besides offering top-notch products and services, effective marketing campaigns are also imperative for the company to entice more consumers worldwide.
"We're active on various online media platforms across regions to promote our products, including the Google ecosystem," explains Lan Li, Overseas Ecommerce Operations Senior Manager at HONOR. "To continuously optimize our marketing results, we're always keen to adopt new technologies to execute more effective campaigns under the premise that the solutions are compliant with applicable law."
While complying with the data security and privacy protection regulations in different countries, the HONOR team has been leveraging Google Analytics to identify target audiences based on the user behavior data on its ecommerce sites for advertising through Google Ads. However, since Google Analytics can only find seed audiences among existing customers, the audience range is rather limited. To maximize the impact of its online marketing campaigns, HONOR wanted to adopt a data tool that enables predictive analytics. In 2023, it decided to add BigQuery to support its Google Ads advertising efforts. BigQuery was selected as the platform of choice because it not only can be seamlessly integrated with the Google marketing tools, but also provides multi-layered data security control mechanisms, including access control, data encryption and audit logs.
"We needed a powerful data warehouse and predictive analytics tool to help us find more seed audiences for more effective precision marketing. BigQuery was an obvious choice because of its leading analytics capabilities and the seamless integration of Google Cloud and Google Ads," says Li.
"We needed a powerful data warehouse and predictive analytics tool to help us find more seed audiences for more effective precision marketing. BigQuery was an obvious choice because of its leading analytics capabilities and the seamless integration of Google Cloud and Google Ads."
—Lan Li, Overseas Ecommerce Marketing Senior Manager, HONORMaximizing online marketing performance through predictive analytics
With the technical support of TrueMetrics, a Google Cloud partner and Google Marketing Platform sales partner, HONOR implemented a new precision marketing method powered by the predictive machine learning (ML) models in BigQuery for its online campaigns in Mexico, which is one of the company's most important markets around the world. Li says that TrueMetrics' expertise in data-driven online marketing has been very helpful for the quick completion and continuous improvement of the project.
"The TrueMetrics team has extensive knowledge in the Google Cloud and Google marketing tools. They can always quickly suggest the most ideal solutions for our needs and handle all the technical work smoothly. The new ML models in BigQuery were built within two months," she adds.
For the new marketing method, HONOR uses Google Analytics to collect user behavior data on its Mexican ecommerce site. Based on the collected data, HONOR's predictive ML models in BigQuery can identify the seed audiences that have higher purchase probability. As the differential privacy technology of BigQuery enables ML reasoning with only statistical features, HONOR is able to run ML models without sharing specific entities' information, effectively ensuring the security and privacy of its users' data.
By using the seed audiences generated by BigQuery to find similar audiences in Google Analytics for target advertising through Google Ads, HONOR has significantly improved its marketing performance, with its return on ad spend (ROAS) up by 63 percent, ad conversion rate increased by 33.5 percent, and cost per click reduced by 40.6 percent.
"Through accurate predictive analytics, BigQuery has helped us identify more seed audiences, which leads to greater marketing impacts," notes Li. "The automated data transfer capability between Google Analytics and BigQuery has also enabled us to build a smooth data pipeline from data collection, storage, cleaning to analysis."
"Through accurate predictive analytics, BigQuery has helped us identify more seed audiences, which leads to greater marketing impacts. The automated data transfer capability between Google Analytics and BigQuery has also enabled us to build a smooth data pipeline from data collection, storage, cleaning to analysis."
—Lan Li, Overseas Ecommerce Marketing Senior Manager, HONOREnhancing ML model training efficiency with BigQuery
Li says that leveraging BigQuery to conduct predictive analytics not only helps boost HONOR's marketing performance, but also facilitates its development process. With its speedy query capabilities, BigQuery can process data of several terabytes within a few minutes, whereas it would have required one hour for on-prem tools to process the same amount of data. The HONOR team can therefore complete its data tasks in a much shorter period of time.
On top of that, BigQuery has greatly accelerated HONOR's ML model training by providing basic pretrained models, enabling easy access to more advanced models in Vertex AI and AutoML, as well as showing detailed model performance metrics. The HONOR team is able to quickly build new ML models and optimize them more efficiently based on the performance metrics.
"The detailed model performance metrics generated by BigQuery are extremely helpful, because they provide clear guidance on how we can improve our ML models. For example, we can easily pinpoint irrelevant features for training and remove them to enhance computing efficiency. Knowing exactly which parameters to adjust, we can also reduce the number of training cycles required," says Li.
Achieving greater marketing results with artificial intelligence (AI)
To further increase its marketing efficiency, HONOR is currently working on automating the transferring of predictive analytics results from BigQuery to Google Analytics. This way, the team can reduce 50 percent of manual workloads and execute marketing campaigns more timely.
"Following the success in the Mexican market, we're going to roll out the ML-driven marketing method powered by BigQuery in other countries under the premise that the technology and solution are compliant with applicable law," notes Li. "At the same time, we'll keep exploring new ways to optimize our online marketing campaigns, such as using the AI tools of Google Cloud."
"Following the success in the Mexican market, we're going to roll out the ML-driven marketing method powered by BigQuery in other countries under the premise that the technology and solution are compliant with applicable law."
—Lan Li, Overseas Ecommerce Marketing Senior Manager, HONORTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Honor
HONOR is a smart end device provider headquartered in China offering top-selling smartphones, tablets and wearable devices to consumers around the world. Prioritizing innovation, the company has more than 60% of its staff dedicated to R&D and will soon launch its own cloud service. In 2022, HONOR's overseas sales growth reached more than 200%.
About TrueMetrics
Founded in 2012, TrueMetrics is a Google Marketing Platform partner and Google Cloud resale and service partner, as well as a data consulting service and solution provider of the Google One ecosystem. With its branch offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Singapore, TrueMetrics offers comprehensive solutions ranging from data tool implementation, data training, data visualization, data analytics to data integration consulting, supporting Chinese brands' overseas business across industries, including retail, high tech, consumer product manufacturing, games, and air travel.