Hoy AG saves 10,000 man hours per year

tl;dr Hoy AG, a Swiss advertising technology company headquartered in Zurich, optimizes the print and online advertising campaigns of its customers and takes care of their implementation. This includes - tracking and analysis of success.

Due to the high level of report automation with Tableau, the company saves an average of 256 hours of time per employee per year, according to CTO Moritz Schneider. Joint analysis of the most diverse data sources brings new insights that provide the company with more convincing points in negotiations with business partners. Individual dashboards also increase customer loyalty.

As Hoy AG runs and optimizes advertising campaigns for customers such as Swisscom, Hornbach and Sanitas, successful campaign tracking and analysis plays a major role in that. Customer advisors and media specialists on one hand need to prove the results of their work with customers and on the other hand use the knowledge gained for optimization of follow-up campaigns. The aim is to achieve the optimal advertising effect with given budgets. To achieve this, Hoy AG collected and evaluated enormous amounts of data that included millions of rows of information about impressions and click or conversion rates from web and social media campaigns.

In the past, employees produced their reports and analyses mainly in the form of extensive and complex Excel spreadsheets.. They had to obtain relevant data sets, merge them manually into tables and then calculate and visualize key figures. “It was a nightmare - especially when, after hours of data consolidation, normalization, and formatting, they finally realized they selected the wrong data. Then they had to restart the entire process,” said Moritz

When preparing data, the company also struggled with differently structured data sources coming from the systems of various advertising publishers. This made it even more difficult to combine and calculate key figures.

During his marketing studies, Moritz became familiar with and gained appreciation for Tableau. And when the company came across it again with a business partner who had in-depth Tableau expertise, they decided to set up a comprehensive data warehouse based on Amazon Redshift and to analyze it with Tableau.

Today, the company's approximately 40 customer advisors and planners draw their reports from the data warehouse, visualize them with Tableau and send them to the customer. Not only has the quality of the evaluations increased dramatically, but the savings in working time is enormous. They’ve saved around 256 hours of working time per employee per year, which is now used for value-added activities “We were able to eliminate the worthless manual work and spend the time we gained in truly strategic customer service and optimizing campaigns more effectively,” shared Moritz

Most significantly, Hoy AG has almost doubled revenues in the last two years, while the workforce has grown by only 45 percent - a clear sign that they can achieve more with fewer employees due to increased efficiencies.

Some major customers already have direct access to Hoy AG's Tableau Server. This allows consultants to prepare their custom dashboards with current campaign results or special views in Tableau and then share them directly with their customer contacts. Customers appreciate this transparency because they have not yet received anything like this from another media agency.

“Then they're actually working on the same data source on the same dashboard and talking to each other,” reports Moritz. “For some clients, they can also add comments directly to the dashboard and discuss them with their advisor. This is really cool, because it creates a very nice collaborative process.” There is no question that the high level of transparency and fact-based information exchange has improved customer loyalty.

With the introduction of a comprehensive data warehouse with Tableau as the front end, Hoy AG has come a step closer to its first major goal - extensive reporting automation. Now it is a matter of gaining new insights from the data important to the business. They want to better understand what people are working on, and how or where they end up losing or winning money,.

For example, they’ve started to compare the performance of different publishers at a fair level. Already, the company has identified and admonished publishers who, by delaying the campaign launches, regularly disregarded advertisers' plans and thus jeopardized their success.

The company's flexibility has also increased due to the faster acquisition of knowledge. Report Moritz: “Today, we generally see problems much earlier. If something doesn't work, we can react much faster. In the past, this was not possible due to the long delay in reporting.”

Finally, individual employees benefit from having better and more information in the form of more autonomy thanks to Tableau. People are able to make their own decisions based on dashboards because they know the data is correct. This is something we really promote in our company,” summarized Moritz.