Why Liftoff chooses Rill over Looker & Tableau for Operational BI
We hosted a webinar with our CEO and Co-founder Michael Driscoll and Hammond Guerin, Sr. Director of Analytics at Liftoff to share how Liftoff uses Rill to capitalize on ad revenue opportunities.
Below we highlighted some key reasons that Liftoff continues to choose Rill over Looker and Tableau for operational BI.
To see the full transcript or watch the video, check out the full blog here.
Results
Operational Value
Sales people are onboarded with less than 15 minutes of training yet able to immediately analyze terabytes of exchange data across dozens of dimensions
Technical Value
Even with 100's of concurrent users and 10,000's of daily dashboard queries, the Liftoff team gets sub-second response time on complex analysis
Partner Value
The Liftoff sales team provides white-glove service to their partners, identifying more opportunities to improve revenue at a greater speed than competitors
Solving ease of use vs. traditional BI tools
Before Rill, Liftoff's visibility into algorithm performance outside of the core data science team was limited and could take two days. With Rill, people on sales calls are able to see how quickly you can interact with the data using this tool. "To go from being blind for two plus days to having this all at your fingertips, that was kind of shocking. So first part is we didn't really have great tooling back then and it was one of the one of the first tools we integrated with."
In addition, Liftoff has a variety of BI tools - Tableau, Looker, and Superset. They also have a handful of homegrown systems that are also part of the landscape. Per Hammond, "I think that Rill is one of the few, if not only, tools where the support for it is really very bottom up. When people join, Liftoff doesn't have a Rill training for the organization. Yet the company has hundreds of users using it as their primary tool. I was talking to our principal analyst last night and he reiterated the same thing to me - the analysts prefer to do everything in Rill if they could."
90% of the analysis in Rill is time series analysis and week over week comparison. "Let's find trends, let's see what's gone up, let's see what's going down, let's see who we need to reach out - and the tool basically does exactly that. So even though Liftoff has Looker with the exact same data loaded, people will go to Rill first whenever they can."
Interactive analysis on billions of records
Liftoff is a mobile advertising business. The overall company was combined by plugging the demand side and supply side together. On the old Vungle side, we have an exchange where we sell our inventory to outside buyers like DSPs. Liftoff, the original company before we merged and became the combined Liftoff, was a DSP. One thing that's interesting from the data perspective is we're still in the process of bringing those datasets and systems together.
The analysis that we're running is typically running in billions, sometimes many billions. That's kind of the typical scale where we would get into other strategies like sampling and obviously aggregation, etc. It's really about the ability to drill into the trends that are happening right now, compared to a relatively recent period.
With Rill, Liftoff is able to analyze that data in real-time with interactive dashboards. "I think that's one other piece that I like to call out is that there's a really big difference between running a report where the data comes back in two minutes, which is still reasonably fast for some for these volumes, and having it come back in two seconds, because that’s the sort of speed where you're thinking and asking questions. I personally think it really changes how people interact with data. The point here is that we'll use this tool because it's so fast and interactive for all sorts of purposes."
Real-time custom analysis to drive deeper client engagement
What's really typical for Liftoff is to analyze the last week of data, which is something that other BI tools can do. But where Liftoff starts to get some of these features of the Rill Explore product that have become indispensable to people would be the comparison tool. That is a lot of what Liftoff's account executives or customer facing analysts are using. Their goal is to help. They are trying to see if a campaign is doing well in these new apps, and let's try to push those or it's trending down. So this week over week trend analysis is critical.
It's really easy to filter because you can do the comparison feature, which allows you to show the impact of different dimensions over time and prove out client value. The comparison is also extremely easy to use, and you can see that the data loads interactively - allowing for Liftoff to engage in "fact-based selling" - building trust with customers by transparently showing real-time data and insights into campaign performance and opportunities.
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