How Appiterate's data science is helping Ola Cabs

The radio taxi market has seen a lot of traction over the past couple of years. The Indian radio taxi market is pegged anywhere between $6-$9 billion dollars by different estimates, and is forecast to grow at 17-20% annually. More importantly, only about 4-6% of this market is organized sector – the rest is by operators who own fleets of 2-50 cars and typically have a presence in one city.

Olacabs seems to be the front-runner in the Indian market with their state-of-the-art mobile first approach to booking cabs. It was the first Indian taxi company to make users aware of the nearest cabs, this gave the freedom to users to book cabs at their own convenience. It’s really good to see Ola giving Uber a tough fight in the Indian market by constantly upgrading its technology.

Ola has been aggressively trying to make sense of the data to increase their mobile dominance. To further strengthen their data-science and product’s roadmap, Ola is now partnering with Appiterate, a mobile A/B testing and app relationship marketing platform for mobile apps.

Tackling competition

The Indian cab industry is seeing more aggressive competition, and the trend isn’t going to change with both international and existing Indian players getting into the picture. Given this scenario, focus on user acquisition was bound to step up. Ola’s move to launch a ‘Referral program’ for its users wasn't any special as others also followed the same suit.

Ola partnered with Appiterate to leverage maximum return out of their marketing campaigns and gain more users on their mobile app. They have been taking data driven decisions to make the app experience visual look and feel to drive more revenues. It’s really good to see startups effectively using A/B testing tools like Appiterate to improve their sales. One of the variations through A/B testing led to an increase in 55%, which translated to a 33% increase in user acquisition via the referral route!

Harsha Kumar, Sr. Product Manager at Olacabs shares

Who doesn’t love an increase in key metrics, but the surprising part was that we could get

our A/B tests up and running in minutes, using Appiterate’s visual app editor.

Mobile Approach

There has been a steady increase in Indian audience transacting on mobile, with a lot of mobile first users being added every day. Current mobile Internet user base is around 155 million and is growing fast. Transactions on mobile have already surpassed that on web for some Indian e-commerce companies and Ola is also getting a major chunk, over 40% of their bookings through mobile.

“Mobile has been and will continue to be key focus for us”, said Ankit Bhati, Co-founder and CTO, Ola Cabs.

We have been investing on mobile experience and Appiterate has been fantastic in their support for getting great RoI from our mobile experiments. We are rapidly expanding into new cities and with this increasing scale, we are betting big on data-science to continue our innovation and retain our edge.

Tanuj Mendiratta, CEO of Appiterate, adds,

Data driven app optimizing approach has been made popular by the likes of Facebook, that recently announced it’s own internal A/B Testing framework, Airlock. Not every company has the resources to build the same infrastructure that Facebook has invested in and that is where we help. We have democratized A/B testing for budding innovative companies like Olacabs who are looking to leverage technology to hack their way to success.

With more transactions happening on mobile, effective use of data in shaping mobile strategies is only going to gain more prominence.