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LiveRamp Case Study: Using ETL for Redshift to Visualize the Customer Journey with Data

LiveRamp leveraged the power of Matillion and Looker together to accelerate time to insights and help push their business vision forward. From up to 12 reports previously to just one seamless view, the company can now connect data from sales, marketing and product to tell a cohesive story and get a 360 degree view of their customers.

Their success

1

Accessed conversion rates for any time period and data source in < 5 minutes per metric

2

Created instant access to conversion rates for stakeholders (previously 1-2 days)

3

Centralized dashboard that incorporates up to 20 different files and data sources

About

LiveRamp provides the identity platform leveraged by brands and their partners to deliver innovative products and exceptional experiences. Powered by its core capabilities in data accessibility, identity, connectivity, and data stewardship, LiveRamp makes it easy to connect the world’s data, people and applications.

Company: LiveRamp

Location: San Francisco, CA

Industry: Marketing & Advertising

Employees: 1,200

Product: Matillion ETL for Redshift

Use Case: Reporting and Analytics

Reporting & Analytics Tech: Looker

Website: https://liveramp.com/

The challenge

Stitching together data along the customer journey

LiveRamp’s mission is to connect people, devices, and data across the physical and digital worlds, enabling more personalized, intimate connections between brand and consumers. Using identity resolution to inform a better customer experience, LiveRamp provides its customers with detailed data to give them a greater degree of context for marketing communications.

Inside its own marketing team, LiveRamp wanted to see the complete journey that its buyers took from awareness through to retention. But with data sources from across the organization, it was difficult to get a visual representation of the customer journey. In order to attain a complete view of their buyers, across every buying stage, Senior Manager of Marketing Analytics, Hoshang Chenoy, wanted to find a way to stitch all of LiveRamp’s customer data together and visualize the entire buyer’s journey from start to finish. Chenoy decided that the marketing team needed one central place for their data so he could perform analysis from the varied data sources to tell a holistic story about their customers.

In addition to not having a centralized place for all data across the business, obstacles included:

  • Data silos: The data were in various formats across multiple silos in the organization: marketing, sales, product, and finance.
  • Team work: The teams responsible for different sets of data were spread across time zones.
  • Data Governance: In order to get the most use of their data, the team needed to pull a set of data that had never been accessed before using the API and somehow exclude the PII inside of that data source.

The solution

Pairing the right team with the right tech

Chenoy’s first step was to gather stakeholders and get buy-in from each person. He brought together the Marketing Director, Head of Marketing Operations and an Executive Sponsor along with the team from Slalom Consulting that included a Data Architect and Engineer and a Senior Developer.

Together, the team worked out what data could be pulled and the method for doing so. Due to the sensitive nature of the data, they gave close attention to permissions, data governance, and the security protocols necessary for this project.

After evaluating different ETL tools and vendors, the team made the decision to use Matillion ETL for Redshift because of the product’s seamless integration with Redshift, the cloud data warehouse they selected for the project. Matillion offered a cloudnative solution that leveraged the underlying power of LiveRamp’s cloud data warehouse and provided the flexibility the team required. The need to write custom code for queries and perform data transformation, along with data governance concerns, shaped their decision to choose Matillion. “There are many ETL tools that do the E and L parts well. Matillion really does the T very well. We also wanted to write custom code for queries and none of the other tools had this flexibility,” Chenoy explained.

The team at Slalom worked to execute their data transformation plan and build jobs that would meet the needs of the marketing team and the business overall. They envisioned, designed, and implemented a scalable data lake in the cloud to leverage the power and performance of a cloud data warehouse.

If a friend or peer were considering using Matillion, I would tell them that Matillion is going to make their life infinitely easier, blow away their superiors with the reports they can produce after blending the data, and literally help shape the direction of a company. It’s very easy to convince someone to use this tool.

Hoshang Chenoy,
Sr. Manager, Marketing Analytics, LiveRamp

The benefits

The full customer journey realized

Chenoy determined how he wanted to build the platform but struggled to understand how to make it easy to digest for the entire team. What he found with Matillion’s UI was an easily understood visualization of data sources and workflows. Using Matillion ETL, the team at LiveRamp can fully see the customer journey, consolidate multiple reports and continue to add more and more data sources. Now, the marketing team is able to interact with prospects and customers using the right message, at the right time, at any point in the buyer’s journey. Since the initial implementation, LiveRamp has seen repeated success with Matillion ETL across other cloud data warehouses and analytics tools.

The results

  • Centralized dashboard with consolidated reports that incorporate up to 20 different files and data sources.

  • Improved time to analysis and insights from one-two days to an instant analysis provided to stakeholders.

  • Access to conversion rates for any time period across any data source in less than five minutes per metric.

  • Easy to understand interface and workflows to guide strategy for active and future campaigns.

What's next

Meeting data demands across the business

After sharing the success of their implementation of Matillion ETL, three more teams have adopted the tool for their own use including Product and Business Intelligence. The Business Intelligence team uses Matillion ETL to help answer data questions for the broader organization. Teams across LiveRamp were quick to incorporate the data transformation software not only for its ease of use but also to take advantage of one of Matillion’s biggest benefits: it works within their firewalls and does not access their data. Chenoy believes LiveRamp will continue to grow their use of data with the help of Matillion. “This tool is so powerful. . . we are now only limited by [the team’s] imagination on what is possible.”

About our Partner

Slalom

Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. In over 30 markets across the US, UK, and Canada, Slalom’s teams have autonomy to move fast and do what’s right. They’re backed by regional innovation hubs, a global culture of collaboration, and partnerships with the world’s top technology providers.

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