With Centralised Data, Homeday Optimises Marketing Campaigns and Activity

Data Stack

• Pipeline: Fivetran
• Sources: Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads Insights, Google Sheets, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Google Cloud Storage, Criteo
• Destination: Snowflake
• BI Tool: Tableau
• SI Partner Implementation: LEROI

Key Takeaways

• Homeday easily centralises disparate data from multiple databases and APIs into a Snowflake warehouse, eliminating the need for manual extraction.
• Homeday experiences a 210% ROI with Fivetran by eliminating the need to hire an additional employee dedicated to creating and maintaining connectors full-time.
• Access to data on real-estate commission rates fueled a marketing campaign centred on Homeday’s lower commission rates.
• By knowing how many leads it generates in a given channel and how much the channel costs, the marketing team makes more informed decisions about optimisation.
• The BI team has built dozens of dashboards in Tableau based on questions that were regularly asked in the past but took days to answer.
• Nearly 100% of employees with access to Tableau use it at least once a day.

Homeday is a digital real-estate agency based in Berlin with a mission of changing the market by lowering commission rates and improving the overall experience of buyers and sellers. The company’s modern approach improves the entire real-estate sales funnel, from intent to sell to final purchase. Since its founding in 2014, Homeday has had a clear impact on the German real estate market: Selling and buying has become noticeably cheaper and faster.

Blind to Business Insights

When Alexander Novikov, BI Lead at Homeday, was hired as the only BI employee at the company, he was tasked with gaining deeper insight into its business processes. With data scattered among four different databases and APIs, and a manual process to combine the data, the company was mostly blind to data insights.

While it was possible to combine and crunch the disparate data sets, the process was complicated and the resulting reports only answered basic questions, such as how many properties were sold in a given time frame. The company needed greater visibility into its processes and a means of answering more pressing business questions.

A Modern Data Stack With Fivetran, Snowflake and Tableau

Realising it needed a single source of truth, Homeday set about looking for a data warehouse. It chose Snowflake because of its high-performance cloud-based architecture, smart approach to data partitioning, reasonable pricing and minimal maintenance. When it came to centralising the data, Snowflake recommended Fivetran.

“You can use your developers to create your own connectors, you can find an open-source tool to do some scripting, or you can go for the most simple approach with Fivetran,” Novikov says. Novikov was able to set up Fivetran connectors easily and get Homeday’s data from multiple sources into its Snowflake warehouse quickly. “It works really smoothly,” he says. “We really trust the process now. We don’t have to use any developers or dedicate any people to ETL whatsoever.”

To complete its modern data stack, Homeday went with Tableau as its BI tool, which its BI team finds flexible and convenient.

From Basic Reporting to Advanced BI

A year ago, Novikov would receive five to 10 business questions a week related to reporting — only half of which the business would be able to answer — and it took two to three days to write the query and get the report. With its modern data stack, the business is able to have all of its data in one place and build dozens of reliable dashboards that provide consistent, immediate insight into regularly asked questions — without any manual work. Additionally, 80% of the company has access to Tableau and nearly 100% of those with access use it at least once a day.

With the basic questions answered, Homeday can focus on more advanced BI. It has people fully dedicated to reporting and plans on expanding its BI team in the coming year. “Rather than focusing on the heavy lifting, the team has time to communicate with other people in the company and focus on answering new questions, looking at the data from different angles and providing the right insights, rather than making ETL work,” Novikov says. He estimates that without Fivetran, Homeday would need one professional to create and maintain connectors full time. Consequently, the business has experienced a 210% ROI with Fivetran.

Driving Marketing Decisions With Data Insights

While Homeday had information about the state of the real estate market in its PostgreSQL database, it was completely inaccessible for the majority of business cases. “We are able to gain deeper insights simply because we have all our data in one place,” Novikov states. With its geographic data centralised in Snowflake, the business was able to:

• Determine whether its current business model and commission rate were fair and save customers money
• Analyze the German real estate market by region with a Tableau dashboard that tracks changes in key real-estate market variables, including the number of properties sold, average price and average commission rate
• Paint a clear picture of its expansion and determine where it needed to recruit realtors

This information has had an immediate impact on the company’s processes and decisions. “Knowing commission rates, in particular, became one of the drivers of our current marketing campaign, focusing on the fact that we offer a significantly lower commission compared to the rest of the market,” Novikov says.

Having accurate marketing information from multiple applications has enabled the company to better measure the success of its marketing campaigns and has led to better decision-making around marketing activities. “We have marketing information automatically downloaded from key digital marketing applications and we trust the data,” observes Novikov. “We can tell our marketing team how many leads they generate in a given channel and how much money it costs us. They are capable of looking at the overall picture and making informed decisions about optimisation.”

Want to see the impact that centralising data can have on your business? Request a demo of our service or get started today by signing up for a free trial.

About Fivetran: Our standardised technology delivers data into your warehouse the right way. Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology supports agile analytics, enabling data-backed decisions across organisations. We’re focused, transparent and trusted by businesses that run on data.

After a five-minute setup, Fivetran replicates all your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance data warehouse. Our standardised cloud pipelines are fully managed and zero-maintenance.

About Snowflake: Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Join the Data Cloud. https://www.snowflake.com/

About Tableau: Tableau helps people see and understand their data. The Tableau platform provides the breadth and depth of capabilities that enterprises need, and adapts to your environment with unmatched flexibility and choice, while meeting the toughest governance and security requirements. People love using Tableau because it is both powerful and intuitive. Tableau leads the industry with the most passionate user community, over 86,000 customer accounts, and a commitment to customer-focused innovation.

About LEROI: LEROI is a leading consulting-agency in Data & Analytics, with a strong focus on customer-centric fields like marketing, CRM, product management, and more. We ensure clients experience a tangible benefit from data and resulting insights by consulting holistically in technology, data and data-driven cultures. From technical details, to what we’ve learned on how to best structure data teams in organizations in over 250 consulting engagements, our clients rest assured that they don’t tap into one of the many — often very costly — pitfalls out there.