Taking a scientific approach to identify our hungry hippos
By Natasha Bath
“…the job at hand was to turn the information into insight.”
At Skyscanner, we are data-rich; we have a wealth of data about our users’ behaviour. So when we tried to identify our top growth levers for Australia, it was all a bit overwhelming. Although the squad had a good idea of what our growth levers were, there were so many factors to take into consideration!
It is scientific
Growth levers are so important as by identifying them, they allow us to maximise our resource and ensure we are focusing on the right activity to drive growth. Their intent is to also allow us to spend minimally yet receive maximum return, helping us to grow our market profitably to bring in quality users as efficiently as possible.
But how does one go about applying a scientific approach to identify our top growth levers?
Ultimately, our number one job is to take users from the state of unaware of our brand to a loyal user. There are three stages in that journey; acquisition, activation and retention.
With my colleague Rebecca’s guidance (thank you Becs!), we broke these down into contributory factors. We then created a comprehensive list of indicators, such as market state, seasonality, channel performance (to name a few) and bench-marked them against the UK to see where we are under-performing and over-indexing. We used the UK as a benchmark as this is one of our more established markets among users (they launched in 2004, while the Australian site launched in 2011).
At this macro level, this allowed me to create a heat-map of our strengths, areas we can improve on and weaknesses/gaps.
Once we identified our focal points, we then took a deeper look at the data to understand how we could further exploit our strengths.
Data diving
When reviewing the data, the job at hand was to turn the information into insight. Through the insight we were able to identify what action we could take to make this a growth lever for us. For example, if the insight was that email was a top performing channel for converting traffic, but had a small user base, the action would be to increase our email user base.
From this piece of analysis, we were able to identify a list of potential growth levers for Australia and create an action plan.
The next step was to continue with more analysis and refine our Squad roadmap. We needed to ensure everything we did was aligned to these key areas of focus and implement an action plan to test each growth lever and help us achieve our OKRs. Thereafter, we needed to re-evaluate and revisit the data to see whether such data has supported or disproved our hypothesis on our growth levers.
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About the Author
Hi there, I hope you enjoyed reading my blog post. My name is Natasha Bath and I’m a Marketing Manager at Skyscanner. I work in the Oceania squad, focusing on the Australia and New Zealand markets. Working at Skyscanner has been a huge eye-opener for me in terms of how progressive we are as a travel tech company.
I’ve always been a huge fan, but only when I started working here did I realise that we really are at the forefront of travel innovation. I love the fact that our sole aim is to help travellers’ lives easier — as an avid traveller (like all my colleagues), I’m all for it!
