The case study demonstrates how Playmobil improved its data quality and marketing efficiency through collaboration with JENTIS, Piwik PRO, and the implementation agency adesso. Precise data was especially critical during peak seasons like Black Friday and Christmas to allocate budgets effectively. An additional challenge was that the customer and the end consumer were often not the same person, making it more difficult to target the right audiences.
Server-side tracking with JENTIS and Essential Mode, first-party data could be collected anonymously and in compliance with regulations, even without user consent. Piwik PRO enabled detailed customer journey analyses, while integration with Salesforce increased data consistency to over 97%. The full case study highlights further results and how this collaboration supports Playmobil in the long term.
About Playmobil
Playmobil, part of the Horst Brandstätter Group, is a German toy brand known for imaginative playsets and quality craftsmanship. With a growing focus on e-commerce and D2C sales, the company aims to provide a seamless digital and physical retail experience globally.
Executive Summary
Playmobil implemented JENTIS server-side tracking to improve understanding of customer behavior and optimize marketing performance. The integration with Piwik PRO led to significant improvements in data accuracy and marketing efficiency.
Challenge
In the early 2000s, Playmobil launched its first online store. Over the past two decades, Playmobil has made substantial progress in e-commerce, including a major relaunch last year where the old shop structure and code base were extensively revamped. Playmobil encountered data inconsistencies between the ecommerce system and other analytics tools and systems in use.
Conversion and order numbers measured through web tracking showed significant discrepancies compared to actual orders. The need for improved e-commerce tracking and analysis capabilities was increasingly urgent, as 60-70% of annual revenue is generated in the fourth quarter. Seasonal peaks, such as Black Friday and Christmas, require precise and efficient marketing efforts that must be supported by an optimized data infrastructure to allocate budgets effectively and strategically.
E-Commerce Data Accuracy Furthermore, new requirements from marketing tools and data privacy could no longer be met. This made effective, data-driven online marketing much more challenging for Playmobil. Addressing these challenges required a comprehensive solution to enhance data integration, analytics capabilities, and data utilization.
The complexity that toy buyers and users are often not the same person (parents vs. children) complicates audience segmentation. Additionally, Playmobil must comply with varying data privacy regulations in different markets, such as the EU and the USA.
Solution
Playmobil chose to implement the JENTIS server-side tag manager to ensure improved data collection, unaffected by ad blockers and tracking preventions (e.g., in Apple Safari). JENTIS offers server-side tracking along with extensive functionalities that enable full data control and privacy-compliant forwarding to a wide range of marketing tools and platforms. Playmobil leveraged the extensive experience of implementation agency Adesso during this process.
The connector, developed and certified in collaboration with Piwik PRO, ensures that Piwik PRO Analytics gains real-time access to far more accurate website data. This enables JENTIS to precisely track customer journeys and purchase processes on Playmobil’s website, facilitating improved customer targeting on the website and ad platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads.
Understanding customer journeys and digital interactions was crucial to optimizing Playmobil’s marketing strategies. With the activation of JENTIS Essential Mode, Playmobil was able to capture nearly all conversions on its website for the first time. Essential Mode enables first-party data to be collected anonymously and legally, even without user consent. This is achieved by anonymizing data so that only necessary and technically required information is processed, thereby preventing data loss. Essential Mode provides session and conversion data that would otherwise not have been captured due to a lack of consent.
The use of Piwik PRO and JENTIS resulted in nearly identical data in e-commerce orders. JENTIS’ powerful Raw Data Tool was used to export raw data and match it with data from other systems. A key part of this process was the reconciliation of order numbers recorded in Salesforce with data captured by JENTIS in Piwik PRO. This reconciliation enabled the identification and correction of discrepancies and errors, leading to higher data consistency. The importance of high data quality, complete and unaltered, was especially evident in this process, as it significantly enhanced marketing efficiency.
Results and Impact
Ongoing improvements in the tracking setup led to data alignment of over 97% between the systems. This significantly reduced discrepancies and increased efficiency in data handling and reporting.
The combination of Piwik PRO and JENTIS enabled better tracking of orders, customer interactions, and customer journeys that were not visible before the implementation. These improvements supported informed decision-making based on more accurate and comprehensive data. This new data quality allowed Playmobil to better respond to seasonal peaks like Black Friday and Christmas.
The optimized data infrastructure ensures that marketing activities during this critical phase of the year can be conducted in a targeted and efficient manner. In the next step, these measures can be applied to further interactions along the customer journey to continue improving data E-Commerce Data Accuracy quality, providing the marketing team with more opportunities for effective, data-driven campaigns.
This ultimately results in better outcomes in terms of more tracked traffic, interactions, and orders, while also reducing advertising costs as networks better understand the target audience and deliver ads more accurately
With JENTIS, we are now able to track over 97% of our orders. This success enables us to better understand customer journeys and address target groups more effectively.
