Margin tracking by country in Looker Studio

Context: making e-commerce tangible

Tikamoon is a DNVB (Digital Native Vertical Brand) specializing in the creation and sale of sustainable solid wood furniture at the right price. The brand generates sales of over €100 million.

More than a distributor, Tikamoon is a designer-builder that works directly with artisan partners in Asia and Europe, and strives to master every link in the chain (from design to logistics, from marketing to customer service) to offer authentic, quality products with the lowest environmental impact.

Its motto, “Passion and Exception”, and its mantra, “furniture designed to accompany life stories… for a long time”, also apply to the field of data, where its initiatives to make the company “data-driven” are remarkable.

With Datama, Tikamoon wanted to structure a common reading of the business and spread this understanding throughout the company, in order to better think about and visualize performance.

One of the first use cases was a simple one, but one that went to the very heart of Tikamoon’s business model:

On a macro scale, our teams closely monitor our margin on variable costs, broken down by country and period (weekly, quarterly, half-yearly).

In the remainder of this article, we describe the approach and the results of this use case.

Approach: break down contribution margin

Market equation & data set

Thanks to a meticulous process of ingestion, preparation and reconciliation in a Google Big Query datalake, Tikamoon is able to create a market equation that takes into account acquisition costs on the various media platforms, their performance, conversion on the site, and then, on the back office side, any returns and refunds.

It’s quite rare for an ecommerce player to have this ability to recover and pass on, right down to the variable cost margin, the contribution of acquisition sources.

The upstream work done by the Tikamoon teams is remarkable.

However, for less advanced readers, the approach could be as simple as not integrating backoffice data, as explained in this article.

The complete dataset at Tikamoon is therefore created in BigQuery and includes the metrics from this market equation, broken down by Date, Country, Universe and Product Category.

You can find it in this Gsheet (of course the data is purely fictitious)

Results

Web app integration

As the team structure is primarily organized by country, performance can be read primarily from this angle.

In the Datama web app, Tikamoon connects to BigQuery data and activates the “Dimension then Steps” feature to systematically analyze margin trends by country, before breaking down the market equation described above by step.

The market equation in Datama: note the “Focused Dimension” on “Country” to force the “Dimension then Step” analysis to always start with Country

Integration into Looker Studio

In order to provide access to the widest possible audience, Datama Compare analysis is also integrated into a Looker Studio report. The analyses are directly consulted by the various stakeholders in this interface, which they are accustomed to entering.

We have replicated this integration in this Looker Studio report

Benefits

With hindsight, Olivier Lemasle, in charge of Datama’s integration, compares the impact to the concept of “depth of field” in photography: the tool makes it possible to go deeper, to see the business from different angles, and to move easily from observation to explanation, from “what” to “why”.

More generally, Tikamoon highlights the following benefits:

• 🧭 Methodological clarity: a market equation for each problem, understood by all and assimilated by teams
• 📈 Cross-functional management: marketing, finance and management aligned in understanding the situation
• ⚙️ Time-saving: analysis automatically generated and integrated into existing tools, such as Looker Studio
• 🌍 Data culture: more concrete, shared business management

Today, the team is working on increasing the number of use cases and integrating Datama into performance analysis “reflexes”.