Softonic boosts click-through by 80 per cent with Google Cloud Platform
Softonic, a software and app discovery platform, has expanded since its 1997 launch from a desktop software to encompass thousands of mobile apps across several operating systems. The company is now one of the world’s leading app discovery platforms, with over 6 million downloads a day and more than 100 million users per month.
With so many customers using the platform, Softonic naturally had access to huge amounts of data. However, its existing business intelligence (BI) solution was not able to provide the desired depth of insight, leading the company to begin seeking an alternative.
To this end, it hired Fernando Ferrer as Director of BI and Analytics in 2018. Ferrer quickly saw that the right BI solution for Softonic could be built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Ferrer said: "We wanted to modernize our data landscape for the first time, get a full 360-degree view of our customers, and harness the power of machine learning for our business intelligence solution. It was a no-brainer. Google Cloud Platform is the way to go."
Ferrer realised the need to also change the BI’s infrastructure, by integrating and unifying data sources onto one platform, which would help provide the 360-degree view of customer profiles that the company wanted.
GCP was chosen for this due to its flexible integrations, capacity to reduce management overhead and its machine-learning and AI capabilities, with the majority of Softonic’s marketing data coming from the likes of Google Analytics and Google Ads.
After deciding on GCP, Softonic engaged Google Cloud Partner Jellyfish to help built the new platform, citing its technical expertise and experience. Jellyfish worked closely with Softonic, keeping an engineer on site and managing the migration process using the SCRUM methodology.
Since the migration, GCP has enabled Softonic to unify over 30 data sources on a single BigQuery platform, for fuller customer profiles. At the same time, it has seen an 80 per cent increase in click-through rates, with recommendations driven by machine learning and detailed analysis.
Finally, the reduced operational overheads with managed services have freed up IT staff to focus on developing features and new products.
