Adrian Maguire (pictured below), head of digital analytics at TUI has worked for the travel company for over 10 years, always with a focus on data. Today, Adrian sets the strategic direction for digital analytics across the TUI group. This includes making decisions about attribution modelling, tag management and KPI frameworks. Adrian spoke exclusively to ExchangeWire behind the scenes at the London leg of Ensighten’s City tour.

ExchangeWire: What have been the major highlights in the evolution of the use of data in advertising, marketing and conversion optimisation?

Adrian Maguire: The biggest challenge has been to break down barriers in the pursuit of becoming a data-first company. To TUI, being a data-first company means making sure whatever we do we’re thinking about measurement and taking action against what we measure.

Another challenge is to remain operationally efficient whilst bringing together data points that exist across our different brand properties and products. Our aim is to give ourselves the best view of what our customers are doing, regardless of with which of the TUI brands they are interacting.

To do this, we need to ensure we have one set of data, collected in the same way, across each of our brands and products.

As the business has evolved, and different companies have become part of TUI, and we’ve evolved our websites, we’ve had to work hard to integrate legacy and new platform data. There have been some huge challenges, but we’ve had a strong principle that the integration should be seamless to the recipients of the analysis. The key to managing change is planning and not rushing into anything without evaluating it against your data strategy and roadmap.

At the same time, we have to remember our customer experience needs to keep pace in a highly competitive market. We don’t want to slow that process down and it again comes down to relationships. As we iterate, our internal partners can pre-empt our data requirements and when we do get something wrong, Ensighten are close to our strategy and can find methods of us obtaining our goals, even if the building blocks aren’t perfect.

Another challenge is to match your knowledge of the business with the capability of the tools your going to be working with. We try to keep our data collection strategy agnostic to any analytics solution, as this is another area where new technologies are emerging all of the time. We trust that Ensighten, as our data collection partner, will be able to bridge any gaps to the analytics technologies remaining agnostic, which gives us maximum flexibility in our decision-making.

What are the main challenges you face when it comes to integrating and making use of data?

In the UK alone, having multiple brands, with multiple products and multiple checkout processes means that we have an enormous amount of digital data to collect and normalise in order to create a single customer view.

Using Ensighten we can capture data wherever we want to send it to whatever other technology solutions we want, and it doesn’t matter if those solutions vary across the group. For us, Ensighten, as a data and tag management solution, is the facilitator of our data strategy.

What are the main challenges you face when it comes to integrating and making use of data?

Collecting data in a first-party manner and joining this data together has certainly been a challenge. All of our digital data is anonymous so joining those different data sets together to ensure our media is working optimally across all brands and channels is crucial.

We no longer feel inhibited by the processes of capturing data. We have learnt that it doesn’t pay to trade data strategy against speed to market. We’ve worked hard at developing strong relationships with our internal development teams and external technology partners to facilitate a smooth process for changes in data capture.

How does data improve campaign performance for TUI?

Historically, viewing a single customer journey was impossible, as we have different websites for our different brands and tracking across all of them meant first-party data was only available for one, the others would then feed in third-party data. Ensighten allows us to have a single identifier across all brands, which brings transparency and allows us to think about brand direction.

From there, we can start to understand how the consumer sees TUI, whether they engage differently with the Thomson and First Choice brands, whether they engage across desktop, mobile web, and in-app. We’re constantly trying to remove these siloes.

What’s next on the horizon for TUI?

The TUI online environment is as seamless as it can be with anonymous data. We have low levels of customer identification and we want to build a product that gives customers a reason to identify themselves to us, e.g. provide a portal to do all things holiday related, from checking the weather, to planning what to pack and checking in online. As we expand our services, that will come naturally.

Bringing technology into high street stores will bring opportunities with data too, we will be able to join online and offline data and give customers a single experience across both. We’re building everything with that in mind today.

It’s thought that roughly half of all brands actually have the capability to analyse data from within their app e.g. page-to-page flow and engagement. The rush to bring an app to market meant that many brands executed their app poorly and missed out on putting in place a robust data strategy. We rolled out our app after many others, but it meant that we had a robust data strategy in place from day one and didn’t have to play catch up.

Strategically, the role of our app is maturing, and, for us, it is about how we transform our app into an acquisition channel – which requires tracking. Globally, the industry has typically seen just 5-7% of conversions from apps, but that’s starting to grow, and we want to be at the forefront of that trend.