Marketing to Millions with ASOS

Our impact

• Enabled over 1 billion+ events daily to be centralised from 9 marketing platforms across paid social, affiliate and pay-per-click channels, overlaying revenue and visit data
• Improved efficiency and accuracy of daily report generation across marketing teams + created a single source of truth for decision-making at speed
• Provided deeper insights into marketing campaigns, with new self-service analytics capabilities and self-service drill-down to optimise decision-making

The challenge

ASOS wanted to establish the CMDS as the ultimate data destination for its marketing stakeholders. The CMDS should be the single source of truth that empowers performance marketing, to drive spending efficiently and enable the teams to make data-driven decisions.

Previously, ASOS’ marketing teams relied on a more manual solution for reporting, with data taken from multiple sources and transformed using macros and formulas. This solution was unable to scale to meet ASOS’ requirements as the volume of data increased. It also lacked self-service capability: the solution did not empower users to interrogate the data, and there was no single source of truth for users to utilise in drilling into the data.

Overall, the aim was that the Looker semantic model would empower ASOS with data analysis capabilities, data-driven decision-making, and collaborative data exploration, thereby driving insights and maximising the value derived from the data ingested into Google Cloud.

“ASOS needed a scalable solution for our marketers to access granular insights across our marketing channels to make actionable decisions on our media investment through a unified reporting suite.” – Tim Roberts, Head of Media Investment

Our solution

Datatonic built the CMDS on Google Cloud, incorporating several new features to allow ASOS to maximise its marketing potential. This included: 

• Event-driven ingestion from the point at which data was received into Google Cloud
• A transformation framework using Google Cloud’s Dataform to create reporting tables, ensuring that Looker queried the data in the CMDS as efficiently as possible to decrease cloud costs
• Load dependency tracking and alerts if the required data has not arrived from external platforms into the CMDS by a certain time
• Full and incremental ingestion patterns, using these interchangeably depending on different data tables’ requirements
• A LookML semantic layer incorporating all of ASOS’s core metrics (revenue, spend, impressions, clicks, etc.) and accompanying dashboards that the team use daily
• Onboarding the ASOS paid team onto Looker, ensuring a seamless transition from the previous solution to Looker
• Assertions developed in both Dataform and Looker to ensure that all the tables in the transformation framework are built in line with pre-existing assumptions made about the business logic

“ASOS has successfully partnered with Datatonic on a number of projects to accelerate our marketing data programme. We’ve found them to be an innovative, flexible and diligent partner to ensure we achieve our goals.” – Ash Fisher, Head of Technology 

This work has several significant benefits for ASOS:

1. Enhanced Efficiency: The paid team at ASOS uses the Looker platform daily to extract rapid insights on marketing performance, leading to faster and more informed decision-making.
2. Better Decision-making: ASOS can use these insights to make better marketing decisions, and to further boost marketing performance, leading to optimised campaigns and better conversion rates and reach. 
3. Scalable Data Models: Implementing a transformation framework with Google Cloud’s orchestration platform, Dataform, means ASOS can build highly scalable data models. These data models efficiently cater to the increased reporting requirements as the usage of the Looker platform expands within ASOS. 

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