ixigo

Easing the Lives of Train Travelers, Enabled by Facebook Tools

The Story

ixigo is India's leading online and mobile travel search and planning platform. They aggregate, search, and compare the best deals for cabs, flights, hotels, buses, trains, and packages. With reviews and tips from 100+ industry websites, ixigo offers a single place for convenient and useful travel information and bookings.

ixigo's wide range of services can be accessed by its variety of mobile apps. One of ixigo's most popular apps is its train app, a one-stop app for Indian train travel. While most train apps in India give seat availability and arrival statuses, the ixigo train app goes the extra mile by including multiple unique features like seat confirmation prediction for wait-listed tickets, station alarms, and updates on ticket status to ease the train travel experience in India. The app has more than 7 million users and over 300K daily active users from 200+ locations in India, making it one of the most popular train apps in India, even more so than the official Indian railways app.

Available on: Windows, iOS, Android

Facebook helped us obtain more engaged customers and target potential users more precisely and seamlessly. We get our most valuable customers from Facebook compared to any other source or medium.

Himanshu Periwal, Vice President - Growth, ixigo.com

The Goal

As part of the Accelerate track on the FbStart program, ixigo used Facebook developer tools to build and enhance their product. With Facebook tools, ixigo was able to simplify the login flow, track in-app analytics efficiently and use it to improve the results of their marketing activities.

The Solution

Looking to simplify the user log in experience, ixigo turned to Facebook Login. It not only provided an easy way for ixigo users to log into the app, Facebook Login users also showed 12% higher engagement with the app compared to the rest.

ixigo leveraged Facebook Analytics for Apps as its core analytics tool to collect valuable user insights on its mobile apps, driving many of its UX updates to better improve the customer experience. Using Facebook Analytics for Apps, ixigo was able to improve the UI/UX and add relevant new features. Data from FB analytics helped them identify the highest drop off in the user funnel happening at the 'train seat availability' page. Due to server issues from India Railways, users would not get the real-time information on seat availability and drop off. Based on this data, ixigo started crowd sourcing the seat availability information from their daily active users and created a new cached train availability feature showing almost real-time information for all trains. This feature immediately led to a 6% improvement in the funnel drop-offs.

Based on insights gathered from Analytics for Apps, ixigo was able to identify its most active customers and target audiences with similar characteristics by using Lookalikes and Custom Audiences. By running a video ad campaign using Facebook Mobile App Ads, ixigo acquired more than 1,150 daily installs at a favorable average CPI of $0.04. The new people from Facebook Mobile App Ads were 11% higher in terms of week 4 retention rate and spent 24% more time on the app than others.

The Results

12%

higher engagement for Facebook Login users

$0.04

CPI through targeting with information from Facebook Analytics for Apps

24%

more time in the app for users coming from Facebook Mobile App Ads

Facebook Products Used

discovered insights into people's behavior using the app

implemented on native ads placeholders and helped scale up revenue

simplified login process and garnered higher customer engagement

improved CPI and gained higher user retention

used developer tools and partner benefits to build their app

consumers could share medical information on Facebook