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CASE STUDY: Otto uses real-time analytics for global brands

By Retail Technology | Friday September 9 2016

Online fashion retailer Otto has been using real-time analytics to accurately track and assess its 120 global brands

Established more than 60 years ago, Otto Group is the world’s second-largest online retailer and the largest online retailer for fashion and lifestyle in Europe.

It has in excess of €12 billion in revenue per year functioning as a globally active corporate group of retailers and retail-related services. For the Otto Group, ecommerce is the fastest-growing sales channel with more than 120 major companies including bonprix, Otto, Crate & Barrel and Hermes.
 
While growing at a rapid rate across borders and having over 120 brands is a very positive position to be in, it does come with transparency and complexity challenges. With a vast array of brand names within the Otto Group, it had more than 100 reports, which included different KPIs and metrics.
 
With no common base for web analytics, the Otto Group lacked a clear overview of the market, including traffic sources to the websites and whether this number was growing. The Otto Group needed a platform that could provide an overview benchmark showing what is, and isn’t, working in the market across all the brands. This would enable Otto to leverage synergies and best practices amongst its companies.
 
The Otto Group selected Webtrends – a specialist in digital marketing optimisation and relevance through real-time, unified analytics and customer intelligence – for a number of solutions including real-time analytics.
 
Webtrends allows companies to truly understand their customers and see the complete picture of customer interactions through unlimited data collection and multi-channel measurement across social, mobile and web. With the use of Webtrends Streams, companies can see real-time analytics through configurable digital dashboards with extensive data reporting to custom and calculated metrics.
 
Webtrends was selected for its global reach and ability to deliver raw data to the Otto Group’s Hadoop cluster for further analysis. Given the number of brands within the Otto Group, Webtrends could also handle the complexity of reporting across multiple domains and provide valuable insight to drive business decisions across the group.
 
During its journey with Webtrends, the Otto Group included over 100 domains starting in Germany, Austria and Switzerland covering desktop and mobile domains, apps and various landing pages. The different brands of the Otto Group are now able to compare different business approaches, share best practices and optimise their webshops.
 
Reliability 

“As one of the largest international online retailers, it’s vital to the success of our business to have reliable insight on each brand’s performance. Keeping accurate data is a challenge when managing a high number of global businesses with individual legacy reports,” said Dr Lars Finger, VP of the ecommerce competence centre at Otto Group. “Our approach was to establish standardised KPIs across the portfolio and thus give complete transparency to the executive board. To help ease the brands into this, Webtrends undertook a series of workshops to align each brand with the same objective, allowing us to drive revenue and have accurate reporting.
 
Webtrends undertook a series of workshops to align each brand with the same objective, allowing Otto to drive revenue and have accurate reporting.
 
Karl-Heinz Maier, sales director for central Europe region at Webtrends, added: “One of the key drivers for a business to consistently improve its offerings is to evaluate what has and hasn’t worked. This can be challenging if you are collating over 100 reporting formats with separate metrics. With heavy regulations across Europe regarding personal data, it was important for the Otto Group to partner with an experienced company that can offer a platform capable of handling a wealth of international data. Including all domains in Germany, Austria and Switzerland has allowed for more accurate reporting and increased transparency of the Otto Group’s online properties. As the Otto Group looks to move into new regions, we will be on that journey with them.”
 
 
 

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