Follow the Camino uses Zoho Analytics to drive data-led decisions across sales, operations, and marketing

The company

Follow the Camino is a specialist walking holiday operator founded in 2006 by CEO Umberto di Venosa. Based in Ireland, the company organizes excursions along the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that ends at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Over a period of nearly two decades, Follow the Camino has grown to a team of 25 staff and serves customers from around the world, offering highly personalized itineraries tailored to each walker's pace, goals, and reasons for undertaking the journey. The company's mission is to organize complex holidays that make people happy. What sets Follow the Camino apart is its position as the only Certified B-Corp specialist Camino operator worldwide, combining deep destination expertise with a customer-first approach rather than off-the-shelf packages.

The challenge

Before Zoho Analytics, reporting at Follow the Camino was a manual, time-consuming process. Every month, the team would export data to Excel and attempt to build their own views of key metrics - namely, trips by booking date, by closing date, and by consultant. It was, in Umberto's words, "a bit of a nightmare."

The business lacked live visibility into core sales metrics such as leads received, open enquiries, bookings, and consultant performance. Without always-up-to-date data, managers were forced to rely on perception rather than fact when assessing which markets were growing, which channels were working, and where performance was dipping.

Marketing ROI was equally opaque. Understanding the cost per booking from paid channels like Google Ads required manual reconciliation across billing accounts and spreadsheets, which was a slow and error-prone process that made it difficult to allocate budget effectively or quickly identify where leads were converting.

The solution

As part of the Zoho One suite, Follow the Camino adopted Zoho Analytics as its central reporting platform. By connecting Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and social media data into a single platform, the company moved from slow, manual exports to live, always-updated dashboards. Managers no longer needed to wait until month-end to understand performance as reports became continuously available, refreshed in real time.

Zoho Analytics is used throughout the company. Sales consultants access their own personal dashboards that show how many leads they have received, how many open enquiries they're managing, and how many bookings they have closed against their monthly targets. Objective bars overlaid on each consultant's dashboard makes their progress toward targets visible at a glance, keeping individual contributors focused, motivated, and accountable.

Zoho Analytics is now embedded into the everyday operations of the business:

• Sales dashboards: Live lead counts, open enquiries, bookings, and targets are tracked per consultant, with objective bars overlaid on each dashboard.
• Marketing ROI: Google Ads data is imported directly into Zoho Analytics, enabling automated monthly ROI calculations showing the cost per booking without any manual data entry.
• Management reviews: Dynamic filtering across dashboards allows leadership to switch views by country, region, or marketing channel, instantly refreshing all connected reports without rebuilding anything.

Follow the Camino highlighted several key features that have shaped the way the business reports and makes decisions:

• Live, always-updated dashboards: Reports refresh automatically, replacing monthly Excel exports with continuously current data across sales, operations, and marketing.
• Flexible visualizations: Tables for precise numbers and visual charts for at-a-glance insights can be created from the same underlying data, giving teams what they need in the format that works best.
• Multi-source data integration: Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and social media all feed into a single platform, enabling cross-channel analysis such as closing rate by country and lead source by marketing channel.
• Dynamic dashboard filtering: A single filter change at the dashboard level updates all connected reports simultaneously, enabling rapid slicing by country, region, or channel without rebuilding any views.

Benefits and ROI

Zoho Analytics has given Follow the Camino something it never had before: a single, always-current view of business performance. Managers can now ask questions about their data and get immediate answers, whether that means understanding which country is driving the most bookings, which marketing channel delivers the best conversion rate, or whether a perceived drop in sales in a particular market is real or a misperception. Data now confirms or contradicts management intuition, leading to better, more confident decisions.

Individual consultants benefit from personal dashboards that make their targets and progress fully visible, reducing ambiguity and supporting a more motivated, performance-oriented culture. Marketing ROI is now automated. The cost per booking from Google Ads is calculated and surfaced monthly without any manual effort, freeing up the team to act on the insight rather than gather it.

Looking forward

Looking ahead, Follow the Camino plans to continue deepening its use of Zoho Analytics as the business grows. With Zoho Analytics already embedded across sales, operations, and marketing, the team sees opportunities to build even more sophisticated cross-data reports, particularly for very specific analytical needs where data from different tables must be combined and transformed. As the company continues to attract customers from across the world, Zoho Analytics will remain the platform through which Follow the Camino turns raw data into the decisions that keep its customers happy.