Since its start in 1978, Twiddy & Company has provided visitors to North Carolina’s Outer Banks with a personal slice of classic southern hospitality. The family-owned vacation group offers more than 1,000 rental homes throughout the area to vacationers and manages the entire rental process from routine property upkeep to greeting guests during check-in. After more than 40 years in business, the Twiddy recipe of regional knowledge combined with premium customer service had already produced a lot of success for the company, but the Twiddy team knew they could take the business further.

The company had always maintained a sizable database that included years’ worth of past customer bookings but only kept this information around in archival storage that was rarely accessed. Twiddy needed a way to access and analyze visitor data and identify, connect with and convert potential customers for its vacation rentals.

We implemented Google Cloud giving Twiddy a powerful platform that connects data points with offline information, such as phone bookings and call times, to unlock in-depth marketing insights on customer behavior that drive growth.

BigQuery provides a highly secure hub for the platform’s analytics processing needs. Twiddy only needs a single developer to run the platform and can even have non-IT staff pull data directly from the warehouse when needed, producing additional time and cost savings. Google Apps Script helps automate web query sourcing for BigQuery, while Data Studio powers data visualization for the platform, allowing property owners to better understand data such as listing traffic and conversion rates. This also gives Twiddy team members a real-time look at which homes and weeks are converting.

Apps Script automatically generates Sheets files that save team members time on data entry and analysis and give them real-time information for more informed customer interactions and improved customer experiences.

By working with us to build its analytics strategy on Google Cloud, Twiddy has transformed how it understands and reaches out to customers. Previously, Twiddy relied on calling customers based on collected rental histories, but by using its data warehouse, the company can better understand a customer’s specific interests and show them vacation properties that fit their exact needs.

For instance, one targeted landing page that sent exclusive deals to site visitors who searched for properties in a specific price range produced a 17% percent jump in email click-throughs compared to standard Twiddy marketing emails. Informed experimentation like this also yielded success across other campaigns thanks to the enhanced accessibility of data related to countless variables.

Web user behavior data from Google Analytics, as well as offline data, is imported into BigQuery, where it’s stored and processed. All of this vital information further informs Twiddy’s various approaches to marketing and guest services.

With intelligent campaigns and other new analytics capabilities powered by Adswerve and Google Cloud Platform, Twiddy also saw its sales close rate increase by an impressive 200%, a 36 percent year-over-year increase in transactions and site browsing session length, along with a conversation rate boost of 76 percent and 31 percent higher revenues, within campaigns.