Skyscanner scales their growth strategy by using Mixpanel to break corporate silos and share customer insights

To Skyscanner, being “data informed” means putting their users first, always. As the company adjusted their corporate structure to accommodate for their 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 mission: growth in region-specific markets. For Cristina Ávila, Growth Manager at Skyscanner, that means customizing web and mobile messaging to drive Skyscanner usage in her local market of Spain.

Although Skyscanner has expanded to a team of around 1,200 employees across 11 offices, consisting of 50+ nationalities, Mixpanel helps them break down silos to share learnings and benefit from each others’ successes and failures.

Why Mixpanel

Cristina 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 travellers 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 was only focused on page views.

User Experience Improvements

Sharing customer insights across markets

Using Mixpanel’s dashboards, Growth Managers are able to keep track of their market in comparison to others across the globe. As a result, the whole team can learn 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 tweaking the call to action to match Android. As a result, many markets saw uplifts on iOS conversion rates, including an 8% lift in Italy and 7% in Spain.

Building more efficient acquisition campaigns

Using Mixpanel’s Insights report, Cristina’s team identified what device types are the most likely to become highly active users on 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.

What’s Next

With 300 to 400 employees using Mixpanel every day across Skyscanner, the team is looking to merge Mixpanel into more and more aspects of their business. Cohort analysis by geolocation is a huge area of focus, because the buyers are so different. Providing the best customer experience so that the Skyscanner app remains a staple over time will remain top of mind as the team looks to continue their exponential growth trajectory.