Data Challenges
Prior to upgrading their data & analytics stack with Hevo and Redshift, Scale Media’s data & analytics team was using Sisense’s native integrations & were manually building API connectors for some data sources. They faced 2 major bottlenecks with this process:
- Sisense was unable to process complex SQL models which resulted in slower query times, build failures & data redundancies.
- The development team had to spend close to 60 hours/month to build and maintain their API connectors.
The acquisition team at Scale Media needs access to real-time data to adjust their bids and campaign placement. Additionally, their business team needs fresh and accurate data for reporting used throughout the organization. Hence, timely availability of data is their crucial requirement but Sisense was unable to scale up to meet this need.
Prior to Hevo, we were importing data directly from MySQL to Sisense, and attempting to deploy some heavy SQL modeling which proved to be too burdensome for Sisense.This resulted in build failures as well as logic having to be duplicated across various dashboards and ElastiCubes. The data processing on Sisense was very slow and it was impacting our acquisition team, as they need up-to-the-minute data so they could scale up their campaigns. Sisense is undoubtedly a great reporting tool but it works far better sitting on top of a data warehouse.
A culmination of both these reasons resulted in the need to scale their Data & Analytics stack and incorporate more specialized tools which would help them improve their data integration, modeling, and reporting process.
The Solution
David was looking for a way to centralize their data, logic behind modeling, and also to ETL the data from their database. His expectations for a data pipeline tool was to get data from A to B with some transformational abilities layered on top.
We sought out to find an ETL tool that offered just as much modeling and transformation capabilities as it did pipelines and integrations. We liked Hevo a lot because it was a good mix of all the features we were looking for and that the transformations were weighed just as importantly or as heavily as simply transferring the data. A lot of the other solutions we looked at, the data transformation was almost an afterthought, but with Hevo it seemed like it was baked in from the start, which we really appreciated.
Scale Media uses MySQL to store its business-critical data and they have set up their data warehouse on Amazon Redshift. David uses Hevo to build automated data pipelines to ingest data from MySQL and other marketing sources such as Google Analytics, Criteo, Outbrain, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. to Redshift. They leverage Hevo to create complex data models, automate schema mapping, and seamlessly integrate transformed data into their Warehouse. This data is then used by Scale Media’s business teams for real-time reporting on Sisense.
Key Results
Choosing specialized tools over the all-in-one tool has helped Scale Media do magic with its data. With Hevo, they were able to get more control over the data flow, improved the query performance with advanced SQL, and completely eliminated build failures & data redundancies. They saved 60 hours/month of their development team which otherwise was spent on building and maintaining API connections. Hevo’s no-code platform and easy-to-use UI have empowered their analytics team to integrate any third-party API within an hour and completely eliminated a need to rely on their development team.
Switching to this modern data stack was easy, quick, and very impactful. We are all benefiting from these specialized tools with Hevo doing all the heavy lifting, it’s taking care of the heavy SQL and reducing the build times means quicker load times for everyone and less downtime for the dashboards. Hevo is a power-packed ETL tool that provides a wide range of integrations, a powerful transformation layer and their support team is fantastic.
David is planning to connect more data sources with Hevo in the future and he’s working closely with Hevo’s development team to build some custom data sources to support their use case. They’re also looking to incorporate Machine Learning into their Data & Analytics vertical to take another step closer to being truly data-driven. Hevo is excited to work together with Scale Media on some of their futuristic projects and looking forward to strengthening this data-driven partnership in the future.
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