How Adevinta increased ROI by 12% with standardized, real-time customer data

Adevinta is the leading online classifieds marketplace in multiple European countries. With a collection of more than 25 digital brands operating across 11 countries, Adevinta is a “company of companies”, all acquired at different times and different stages of maturity. Adevinta’s marketplaces form an integral part of the local online community, with an average of 3 billion monthly visits to its sites. Everyday, Adevinta’s technology empowers millions of buyers and sellers to find jobs, homes, cars, consumer goods and more. 

Prior to Segment, each team had its own siloed data strategies leading to unaligned processes over the years. The Adevinta team struggled with disparate, inconsistent data sources, lacking consistency across business units and manual data pipelining from 20+ different production apps. To improve business decisions and better connect its cross-functional teams, Adevinta knew it needed to standardize its data by implementing unified tracking across all its company verticals and sites. 

To address the “Chaos,” as described by Aingeru Duarte, Head of Digital Intelligence at Adevinta, the team implemented Segment as its Customer Data Platform (CDP). With Segment, Adevinta can collect and unify data with real-time profiles, create tracking plans with Segment Protocols to avoid violations, improve control over its data quality and activate data for personalized campaigns with Twilio Engage across each of its business verticals. 

Now, every team at Adevinta is moving in the same direction with access to consistent, trusted customer data.

"Segment’s Tracking Plan gives our team the ability to work with the same processes across teams, and have better control of our data. After putting a Tracking Plan in place, we are now opening a new door with Twilio Engage, which has been a game changer.”

Aingeru Duarte, Head of Digital Intelligence at Adevinta

Inconsistent data collection, resulting in misaligned teams 

Prior to Segment, dashboards, reports, metrics, and data definitions were spun up by different business units within different marketplaces at Adevinta. On top of that, decisions were made with data of varying quality, relevance, and trustworthiness. “Before Segment, nobody had the big picture. If you asked someone to identify all the tools that were consuming data across the company, no one could answer that question,” said Xavier Jurado, IoS Technical Lead at Adevinta.

Because of this, Adevinta’s Engineering team began to question the way data was being dealt with across the company. Before Segment, 25% of its day-to-day work was spent correcting errors, attempting to confirm data in other sources, and addressing the inevitable mistakes that followed. This resulted in significant engineering efforts spent to maintain data collection and standardization. 

But, this wasn’t just a challenge faced by Engineering. Without a synchronized method for tracking data, the entire company felt the impact:

• Product lacked the insights they needed to inform their product roadmap.

• Marketing wasn’t able to attribute their programs and investments to revenue.

• The Insights team lacked a clear picture of patterns and trends in the business.

Not only was Adevinta pushing to align its data across marketplaces, but it also wanted to better activate that data to power personalized marketing campaigns and data-driven product updates. However, the first step was to take control of its data quality by collecting and connecting customer data and implementing real-time tracking and validation. 

Connecting data across organizations to form a unified customer view

Adevinta chose Twilio Segment as a single platform for collecting customer data. The company uses Twilio Segment Sources, within the Connections product, to collect user behavior data across Website, Mobile and mission critical data via Server side. They use Twilio Segment Destinations to push the data out to analytics, marketing, A/B testing, advertising, heat mapping and mobile attribution tools.

As a result, Twilio Segment has become the primary source of truth for its customer behavior allowing Adevinta to collect once and send the same set of tracking data out to all their destination tools for activation.  With the phase out of third party cookies and website privacy changes, Adevinta also have added Advertising Conversion API destinations to allow them to send conversion data downstream, directly to advertising channels for matching and campaign optimization.

Twilio Segment accelerates the time to value as Adevinta implements new tools and destinations, without having to build out individual integrations. Additionally, the data flowing through these integrations is clean, consistent and reliable. Now that its Engineering team is no longer focusing on fixing data errors and connecting tools, they can spend more time on more strategic, innovative product investments.

Using Segment, Adevinta’s team has time to add more events to the tracking plans as new web pages and actions are added. The data teams can ensure new events/parameters are mapped to destinations, effectively focusing its efforts on more strategic initiatives.

Empowering multiple business units with high-quality, unified data 

Adevinta had previously been using another CDP, but needed the ability to connect additional sources and destinations, which were not available on that platform. They needed a more powerful CDP to bring all its teams under one data governance strategy.

With this challenge in mind, Adevinta implemented Segment Protocols to govern event schema and serve as the connective tissue between business units. Using Protocols, Adevinta created  a central repository for its data with a real-time Tracking Plan. A Tracking Plan allows users to outline the most important events and properties it plans to collect, assign definitions and validate calls that are delivered to Segment. 

Adevinta have built a single tracking plan for each marketplace brand across website and mobile sources to ensure the same checks and balances are applied to all tracking data. 

With a referenceable data dictionary in place, teams across the organization had more consistency, which resulted in less implementation errors. Because of this alignment, Adevinta was able to democratize data governance across its entire company. This resulted in a 10% increase in operational efficiency and a 5% decrease in data costs from consolidating its tech stack. 

The ‘lightbulb’ moment that confirmed Adevinta’s new approach was observed in a hallway conversion, between two developers. Best told in Xavier’s own words, “a few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation that made me smile. A developer from one business unit told a developer from another unit that something he had implemented on one of his pull requests did not align with our new standards for data tracking," he continued, “at that point, we knew that we had accomplished something that was broken before. We had data champions all over the company.”

Data consistency resulting in organization change 

As Adevinta built its Tracking Plan, it soon realized that implementing Segment was only a fraction of the issue it was trying to solve. Initially, when it set out to address data problems, Adevinta identified two approaches. First, it could choose to dictate data standards to business units top-down, and hold teams accountable for data quality. Or, it could collectively educate teams on data standards, and then enforce them cross-functionally, in a bottoms-up approach.

What Adevinta found was that communication between different business units was an equally important issue, on top of data standardization. It needed a tool to help teams work for, not against, each other, by improving cross-functional collaboration with trusted data. 

Using Segment, Adevinta was able to take the bottoms-up approach. With the support of Segment Professional Services, each business unit at Adevinta was individually interviewed to understand its business requirements, goals, and pain points. After that, a Technical All Hands was held, teaching Engineering teams across business units how to integrate Segment. Finally,

Adevinta held a Strategic All Hands to Product, Marketing, and Business teams on leveraging Segment to activate data. With all teams aligned and on-board, Segment became a vehicle for organizational change at Adevinta. 

Not only does Adevinta now have a data governance process in place, but Segment also acts as a tool for cross-functional communication. Standardized data has resulted in a reduction of misaligned teams and departments. “We are very happy with how easy it is to work between all of our verticals and sites, with the help of Segment. Our teams are now working in the same way, moving in the same direction. I have no doubt that Segment has been the main driver of this transformation,” Aingeru says. 

With a modern data infrastructure in place, teams across Adevinta can activate its data to power real-time audiences and optimize user journeys. By utilizing Segment in its campaigns like App Install and Acquiring New Sellers for example, Adevinta is activating data to achieve efficiencies in revenue growth. With Segment Audiences, which are groups built based on event behavior or traits directly on top of complete customer data sources, Adevinta can identify and target specific users and personalize messaging, based on their previous interactions with the brand. Building personalized customer experiences across channels enabled Adevinta to increase return on investment (ROI) in their ad campaigns, directly impacting marketing campaign cost savings metrics. 

Boosting personalized campaigns to increase conversion rates

After solving its data process and collection challenges, Adevinta embarked on its Personalization journey. Adevinta used Twilio Engage , which enables customized, real-time user experiences, to create multiple personalized campaigns. With Engage, Adevinta can stitch together user-profiles across platforms, like websites and devices, as well as its cross-vertical business units, to create a better understanding of its users. With access to this real-time customer data, Adevinta is able to create audiences based on high-quality data and boost personalization to provide better customer experiences. 

One example of Adevinta activating its data using Engage is its campaign to acquire new sellers for its market-places. Adevinta built a retargeting campaign to improve the engagement of its sellers. Using Segment Audiences Adevinta built various segmented groups of customers to improve the effectiveness of targeting. It collected data around “users posting ads,” in a specific time period as well as “ad categories posted,” and exclusively targeted audiences with specific behavior and interests. With over 1,290 active audiences built in Segment, Adevinta continues to improve its ability to target groups and provide unique, personalized messages, contributing to improved customer experiences. 

From there, it delivers personalized messaging around the value Adevinta could provide in those specific areas, with the goal of motivating those users to sell more. Adevinta has seen a significant improvement in cost per new ad, due to this exclusive targeting through Twilio Engage. With this retargeting campaign, Adveinta has saved €190K a year by efficiently powering their marketing execution downstream with centralized data-driven audience.

In addition, Adevinta’s Marketing teams utilize Segment to expand its audiences, using a combination of real-time data as well as historical customer data, which was previously limited with its traditional email service provider. This allowed for considerable cost savings and an expansion of use cases. One example of an expanded audience Adevinta built was an “suppression list.” By creating an audience of users who, for example, already had Adevinta’s app installed, it was able to exclude those users from receiving the “install our app” advertisement. Not only does this provide a better experience for the end user, by avoiding irrelevant ads, but it also resulted in a 12% increased return on investment, directly impacting campaign cost saving. As Aingeru puts it, “We couldn't have done this without Engage.”

Adevinta uses Engage to acquire new users, retain customers, and drive advertising revenue growth by sending audience cohorts to an advertising partner for sell-side advertising. With the death of Data Management Platforms (DMPs), many publishers are turning to CDPs to super-power their Ad servers with better insights based on first party data. 

What’s next?

Investing in Twilio Segment has provided significant value to Adevinta, but there is still more to accomplish. Next, Adevinta hopes to utilize its clean data to modernize its Product roadmap by implementing personalized recommendations for users. Adevinta also plans to work with its data teams to send audiences to a downstream destination, Tableau, for data analytics visualization. 

As the Adevinta team closes out the year, it plans to utilize Segment to “focus on strategy execution of personalization, ensuring user-centric approaches and enabling cross-vertical activities,” says Aingeru.

Adevinta’s phrase to represent its approach to data standardization and activation is, “all for one,” meaning that teams across all verticals will rely on centralized data. With Segment at its core, Adevinta will enable this cross-organizational collaboration through standardized data leading to relevant, personalized customer touch points across all its channels — leading to more positive, enjoyable experiences for buyers and sellers looking for jobs, homes, cars, consumer goods and more.