Data Sources: Mixpanel, Salesforce Data Pipeline: Fivetran Warehouse: Google BigQuery BI Tool: Looker

Brandwatch, a social media intelligence platform, helps brands decipher positive and negative emotions around their products and names. Its tools and solutions give companies a deep understanding of the online conversations around themselves and their competitors.

Although Brandwatch does a superb job handling data from multiple sources for its clients, Edward Mancey, Brandwatch's Head of Business Intelligence, realized the UK-based company needed to improve its internal company performance metrics. For this, he sought out a new analytics data stack.

Manual Reporting Fails to Provide Sufficient Insights

Brandwatch wanted to be able to track the rate of adoption of its service among new customers, and whether new features helped or hindered its product. Brandwatch’s service usage data is collected through Mixpanel and its customer-related data is in Salesforce. It was critical to join these two data sources in order to gain meaningful insights.

Attempting to join these data sources manually was time-consuming and delivered very limited results. "We had to pull Excel reports out of Mixpanel and Salesforce from different engineering teams, work to mash up the numbers, and then try to make sense of them," Mancey says.

He says that Brandwatch, with Fivetran centralizing its data, has saved about four hours a week in engineering time to produce "minor reports." Additionally, the company saves as many as 40 hours a week when it comes to building extensive reports. "We needed to have all of that insight automated and combined so we could look at and analyze data with dashboards and not have to build reports manually ourselves," he says.

Setting Up the Entire Data Stack

Brandwatch chose to use a fully managed data pipeline solution offered by Fivetran. It provides the option to create a BigQuery data warehouse in a few clicks, which can then be connected to Looker through a setup wizard. It only took 15 minutes for Mancey to connect Salesforce and Mixpanel data into BigQuery and access the data through Looker. See how quickly this can be accomplished in this Fivetran + Looker video.

According to Mancey, it all just worked seamlessly. "I got what I wanted, something automated and trustworthy," he says. "Just click a few buttons, enter your credentials, and it's all up and running. Fivetran does its job!"

Creating a Culture Around Data

Previously, there was a communication disconnect between the sales team and development teams at Brandwatch. Sales would suggest feature enhancements to better support customers, but without any real data it was difficult to know the true merit of the suggestions.

"Once the Looker dashboards were set up, the developers could suddenly see how users were interacting with the products and features they had created. They got excited to see how people were using what they made. They didn't need a salesperson to come over and say that something was or wasn't working," Mancey says.

Developers were not the only ones to capitalize on this data transformation fueled by Fivetran, BigQuery and Looker. Brandwatch account managers created a health metric for each of their customers to gain deeper insights by understanding how clients use specific parts of the platform.

"Now the account managers can really see which customers are using the product effectively and the developers can see what aspects are working effectively," Mancey says. "This really aligned everybody — sales, account managers and engineers — and made it easier for everybody to prioritize issues. We can easily put the usage stats in front of them and they love it."

Return on Investment

The switch away from manual reporting has allowed Brandwatch to drill down to a host of never-before-visualized metrics, enabling a new level of granularity. Some of this includes:

• Departmental level performance metrics
• Deal velocity
• User engagement and retention
• Faster time to value
• Fostering a data-driven culture

"What Looker has enabled us to do is have complex metrics," Mancey says. "After spending some time setting up dashboards in Looker, we now just press a button to refresh the data for an endless number of metrics. Before we could only look at data at a high level because each report took hours to refresh."

Fivetran product specialists are available to present a demo of our service. You can also request a free trial.

About Fivetran: Our standardized technology delivers data into your warehouse the right way. Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology supports agile analytics, enabling data-backed decisions across organizations. We’re focused, transparent and trusted by businesses that run on data.

After a five-minute setup, Fivetran replicates all your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance data warehouse. Our standardized cloud pipelines are fully managed and zero-maintenance.

About BigQuery: BigQuery is Google’s serverless, highly scalable, enterprise data warehouse designed to make all your data analysts productive at an unmatched price performance.

About Looker: Looker is a new kind of analytics platform that lets everyone in your business make informed decisions —from anywhere. Across industries, today's most data-driven businesses use the Looker platform to do more with their data.