How Trainline Gets a Global View of Marketing Acquisition

Marketing acquisition is a tricky business to monitor and improve. With paid campaigns running 24/7 and users interacting with those ads around the clock, static dashboards are no longer the answer. Marketing executives are beginning to realize the incredible potential of dynamic big data, and only 12 percent are still willing to rely on static dashboards for decision making.

The growing preference for dynamic reporting positions real-time data as the tool for the most accurate marketing insights. Marketing teams often invest in many different services and solutions to sustain their growth. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to manage.

Marketing Attribution: There’s a Better Way

Trainline is Europe’s leading independent train travel platform and retailer of rail tickets. Trainline sells tickets worldwide on behalf of 48 train companies, helping their customers make more than 100,000 smarter journeys every single day in and across 24 countries. Trainline is a one-stop shop for train travel, providing customers with a complete set of travel options.

The Challenge for Trainline

As an online marketplace, Trainline has always been convinced that data adds value for marketing teams. That’s why early on, they created a technical team within the marketing department tasked with creating aggregated, centralized dashboards focused on Trainline marketing acquisition efforts. This ambitious endeavor called for data science skills and a tool strong enough to blend and support multiple data formats and sources to track acquisition according to certain parameters.

Starting from scratch, how could the technical team ensure they ended up with a tool that allowed them to improve and upgrade their own skills while also satisfying the marketing department’s requests quickly and efficiently?

Marketing Analytics for a New Era

The Solution

To satisfy the unique challenges and needs of both the technical and marketing teams, Trainline turned to Dataiku, which allowed them to:

• Save time by using Dataiku’s workflow development features to duplicate workflows across teams and across projects. Previously, data scientists had to continually repeat processes when creating similar workflows.
• Blend multiple data sources and create dedicated custom connectors to gather all data formats, thanks to Dataiku’s flexibility and coding features.
• Instantly detect and solve data process hiccups via Dataiku’s whitebox interface without having to start the whole process again from the beginning.
• Empower teams to work together regardless of technical ability using Dataiku’s collaborative features, web interface and click-and-drag options.

Using dashboards to get a feel for a model before your build

Watch Video

Without Dataiku, the marketing team would have to rely on the technical team to continually provide or update data, which would be inefficient and ineffective for both teams.

“Dataiku empowers Trainline’s marketing team to leverage the company’s vast amount of data. We now have a comprehensive understanding and easy access to data relevant to our marketing department, and our next step is monitoring each euro we spend and maximizing Trainline’s money allocation in real-time.”

– Cedric Raud, Data Engineer, Trainline

Thanks to Dataiku…

Trainline teams have been able to quickly improve their marketing dashboard and get a real-time view on marketing budget allocation. They have also significantly increased data capacities:

• Data processes construction time went from one month to one week.
• Data engineers have multiplied their efficiency by three.
• Marketing teams can now access the outputs they need in a few minutes.