Company

Skyscanner is a global travel search site, designed to support and inspire people to find the right travel options from the millions available at the best prices. ​The company is available in over 30 languages and used by over 60 million people every month.

Goal

To Skyscanner, being data-informed means putting users first, always. As the company adjusted its corporate structure to accommodate for its exponential growth, Skyscanner moved to a “squad” and “tribe” model that combines members of marketing, sales, and product to work more collectively towards a common goal—growth in region-specific markets.

Solution

Cristina Avilia, Growth Mananger at Skyscanner relies on Mixpanel to help with funnel analysis across devices and markets. “Thanks to the level of detail we get from Mixpanel, we can see the bigger picture,” says Cristina. Skyscanner uses Mixpanel to understand the specific steps in the funnel in which travelers do or don’t take certain actions. “It’s not just for marketing use cases, Mixpanel allows us to better understand our different types of users. Thanks to the cohort functionality, we can identify and tackle key issues in the product.” Mixpanel’s customizability enables the team to conduct much more detailed analysis than what they had with Google Analytics, which only focused on page views.

Sharing customer insights across markets

Using Mixpanel’s dashboards, Skyscanner growth managers are able to keep track of their market in comparison to others across the globe. As a result, the whole team learns from each other’s discoveries, despite being in separate offices.

For instance, Cristina’s team discovered that one step in the iOS payment funnel wasn’t converting as frequently as it did on Android. This was due to the call to action on iOS being worded slightly differently. Based on this discovery, Cristina and other growth managers across markets tested changing the call to action to match Android. As a result, many markets saw uplifts on iOS conversion rates, including a 4.2% increase in Sweden, a 7% lift in Spain, and an 8% lift in Italy.

Building more efficient acquisition campaigns

With Mixpanel’s Insights report, Cristina’s team identified what device types were the most likely to become highly active users on the app. These findings allowed the team to narrow in on their campaign targeting so that they were only paying to advertise to users who, based on the type and model of their phones, were most likely to use the app more frequently. They shared this intel with their ad networks and saw improved lifts in the ROI of their paid marketing efforts.

Results

Expanding to a team of around 1,200 employees across 11 offices, consisting of 50+ nationalities, Skyscanner relies on Mixpanel to help them break silos and learn from each others’ successes and failures across borders. In addition to growing their region-specific markets, the team was able to increase conversion rates and improve their paid marketing ROI.