Shazam boosts sales and advertising with Splunk big data tools
'We count on Splunk Enterprise to help us understand the impact of new features,' says executive vice president of engineering for Shazam
Music and television recognition mobile application Shazam has deployed Splunk Enterprise big data analytics tools to better understand users and drive advertising revenue.
Shazam's mobile app identifies TV shows or songs by using a digital fingerprint of the audio to scan a database of millions of music tracks and TV shows.
The user is then presented with information about the music or TV show, including where it can be bought and related items such as concert tickets.
As a result, sales and advertising play a huge role in Shazam's business model. Properly using big data and analytical tools to mine the terabytes of data the app creates and then using that information to run an effective advertising and sales campaign is vital.
To help it do just that, Shazam selected Splunk Enterprise to help deliver key business insights to its salesforce and advertising partners in order to drive more effective campaigns.
Shazam began using Splunk in 2012 and now views it as a valuable resource for employees throughout the organisation, including product managers, engineers and the sales team.
"At Shazam, we move quickly as an organisation to constantly improve our apps and user experience, and we count on Splunk Enterprise to help us understand the impact of new features on that experience," said Charles Henrich, executive vice president of engineering for Shazam.
"With Splunk software, we can now analyse all of our mobile app data without the batch processing and other time-intensive steps required with traditional business intelligence solutions, so we can now provide insights to the people who need them, in real time," he added.
Henrich and his engineering team now use Splunk to monitor and measure even the smallest change to the Shazam app in order to determine whether it brings the required benefits.
One example of this occurred when a new home screen for the app was released and Splunk Enterprise was used to assess the optimal placement of individual tiles in order to maximise user engagement.
By using real-time business analytics in this way, Shazam has been able to improve sales and advertising revenues and product development.
"Shazam's user base is growing at an incredible rate and we are pleased that Splunk Enterprise is helping find new and innovative ways to delight Shazam's users," said Matt Davies, senior director of EMEA marketing at Splunk.
Shazam isn't the only highly technological firm to benefit from Splunk analytical tools. Valve, the developer behind the Steam digital distribution platform and games including Half-Life, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, recently announced that it intends to deploy Splunk across its security and IT operations teams.