Proving that your efforts are paying off isn’t always easy, but Wego is starting to see benefits from a data driven approach. Ritesh Gupta reports

Having a business that is data driven means different things to different organisations. For Joachim Holte, chief marketing officer of metasearch engine Wego “it is entirely about relevance and utility to our customers”.  

With over 5 million monthly visitors Wego gathers a lot of data. “This gives us a great opportunity to be more relevant to our users by aggregating our data and presenting it back in a useful way - without being confusing, or overwhelming,” says Holte.

Don’t complicate matters, consider the simple things before you try to become amazon.com

Extracting data from the property management system, websites, customer relationship systems are basic prerequisites for a data driven approach. However, Chinmai Sharma, vice president of revenue management and distribution at Louvre Hotels Group, says “a data warehouse type setup with a business intelligence tool on top will make analysis a lot easier for mid to large companies”.

Holte’s advice is to go for the low hanging fruit. “Don’t complicate matters, consider the simple things before you try to become amazon.com,” recommends Holte. For example, open source software can be plugged into a site to show users what other users have bought or looked at. 

Wego has the following suggestions for attracting more revenue:

·        Improve your core product: Firms need to be more relevant and attractive to users and the team at Wego is making use of analytics for its hotel deals product to monitor things like pricing for each hotel versus their competitive set, seasonality and so on.

“When we see a remarkable deal for the dates the user is looking for, we highlight this in search results,” says Holte. “It sounds really simple, but it involves a lot of number crunching. On the front end, it should be simple to use, useful and most importantly save the traveller lots of money.”

·        Find new ways to generate fresh revenues: Wego continues to refine its data driven advertising platform. The team automatically identifies and defines segments of its users based on their search patterns and other attributes and makes these (without revealing any personally identifiable information) available to its advertising partners. A credit card company in Singapore, for example, might be be interested in buying ads spots to users that have purchased a first class or business class ticket in the past.

“We can show ads to these segments that we identify on Wego.com as well as right across the ecosystem of ad networks, massively increasing the reach, volume and effectiveness of our advertisers’ campaigns,” explains Holte.