Information Builders > Case Studies > Yellow Pages Uses WebFOCUS to Demonstrate ROI to Advertisers

Yellow Pages Uses WebFOCUS to Demonstrate ROI to Advertisers

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

Canada

Product

WebFOCUS
Infopliance
Hadoop (Cloudera)

Tech Stack

Business Intelligence
Big Data Analytics
Hadoop

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Revenue Growth

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

About The Customer

Yellow Pages is a digital media and marketing solutions company that serves about 260,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across Canada. The company has transitioned from a print media company to one that offers a full spectrum of digital marketing solutions and services for businesses. The organization’s Customer and Advertiser Analytics group provides advertisers that run ads via the company’s web and mobile properties with information they need to measure return on their advertising dollars and track the success of their campaigns.

The Challenge

Yellow Pages, a leading media and marketing solutions company in Canada, was faced with the challenge of harnessing big data to provide advertisers with a simple, intuitive way to access and analyze information about their digital marketing campaigns. The company had to manage more than 20 TB and 52 billion rows of data. The goal was to create a scalable, high-performance, customer-facing application that allows advertisers to perform deep analysis of results.

The Solution

Yellow Pages chose the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform from Information Builders to support an application called YP Analytics. YP customers use this user-friendly dashboard to track interactions and measure key performance indicators focused on ROI and revenue. These analyses involve massive amounts of information and WebFOCUS integrates with Infobright’s analytic columnar database platform to accelerate query response times. Information from Hadoop is migrated to the analytic database platform, where it is compressed to an average ratio of 35:1. Yellow Pages uses Hadoop to cluster the entire table every day to ensure fast response times.

Operational Impact

Data is compressed from 24 TB to less than one, dramatically accelerating response times.
By proving value to advertisers, Yellow Pages can drive better customer engagement to boost retention, revenue, and up-sell/cross-sell.
The user interface for YP Analytics is highly intuitive, consisting of reporting widgets that offer instant access to critical information.
Advertisers can also customize their views. For example, they can view activity by response channel (calls, interactions, visits), type of campaign (online, mobile, print, search engine) or line of business.

Quantitative Benefit

Approximately 52 billion rows (nine TB) of raw data are loaded and processed each day, containing a rolling 25 months worth of data.
Response times for both canned and ad hoc queries are in the sub-second range for small and medium-sized businesses. For large advertisers with thousands of merchants, the response time may vary from two to 10 seconds.