Enabling self-service analytics at Emodo
Emodo, a division of Ericsson, runs a leading programmatic exchange that helps advertisers and publishers create memorable connections with consumers through more relevant, rewarding and impactful advertising. Emodo’s advanced native format, Adapt, outperforms alternative programmatic solutions through a better approach to contextual relevance, creative personalization and KPI optimization.
Creating a culture of proactive analytics - putting granular insights at the fingertips of each team
First and foremost, the exchange handles billions of daily requests, 100’s of TB monthly - so there is significant scale to mine for improving publisher revenue and advertiser campaign optimization. Current reporting systems required a roll-up to daily levels to be able to make data queryable - missing opportunities for more granular analysis.
Additionally, the company has grown via acquisitions meaning multiple reporting solutions and a bit of “dashboard sprawl.” Even with the large number of pre-built reports, analysts still needed to run a high number of manual queries to get results for business stakeholders putting a large burden on analytics teams to support those requests.
With a goal of pushing analysis out to each team, Emodo needed a solution that could:
- Process extremely high data volumes fast - at a reasonable cost.
- Create a new data model that would reduce the 100’s of current reports required.
- Provide self-serve analytics to a variety of stakeholder groups (executives, sales, finance, account management) to reduce dependency on Engineering.
As part of initial onboarding, the Rill Data and Emodo engineering teams partnered closely on building out a unified data model that could support a single dashboard for all use cases. In less than 4 weeks, the combined teams rolled out a new data model, updated pipeline and validated dashboard to dozens of internal stakeholders.
Results
Operational Value
Self-service analytics to reduce operational overhead
Sales Value
Building customer trust with faster analytics and greater transparency
Technical Value
Quick onboarding and reduction in ongoing maintenance
Self-service analytics to reduce operational overhead
The most immediate impact for the Emodo team was providing more flexible and granular reporting directly to various stakeholders including sales teams, executives, ad ops and finance. Rather than relying on engineering teams to develop new reports for each request, teams have both an “explore” view for ad hoc analysis and a “dashboard” view for scheduled reports and pivot tables.
With the new capabilities, the Emodo team can now:
- Analyze Exchange/SSP data in a full funnel - from outbound requests through impressions vs. the dozens of previous dashboards to achieve the same goal
- Send direct links to specific analyses - a huge help in facilitating remote work and consensus on results
- Dig into hourly detail with ad hoc analytics - opening up new opportunities for customer-facing teams to identify campaign/inventory insight
Building customer trust with faster analytics and greater transparency
Through Rill, various customer-facing teams now have direct access to data that previously required either multiple reports or custom views. The difference in workflow means new opportunities for insights and quicker turnaround for prospect/customer questions. Specifically:
- Pivoting between sets of dimensions to see insights - particularly at deal level and providing site lists for clients
- Utilizing Rill to understand traffic across the network - including as a prospecting tool to identify opportunities to improve client value
- Providing direct SSP/publisher access - via both dashboard and API - to improve client relationships and grow spend
Quick onboarding and reduction in ongoing maintenance
Quick onboarding and reduction in ongoing maintenance
Beyond client value, Rill’s team has been able to help Emodo meet internal goals on reducing reporting maintenance. As the company has grown through acquisition with disparate systems, Rill has been able to unify reporting with custom pipelines and dashboard views - eliminating multiple sets of previous processing and providing streamlined reporting for stakeholders. Now, Emodo no longer needs to rely on custom Athena queries for dozens of dashboards. Instead, Rill’s single view can answer those questions in real-time.
Additionally, the teams have continued to optimize data processing and performance. After the initial implementation, both sides worked on a combination of roll-up strategies, pipeline processing and request sampling to further optimize costs. The end result - the Rill implementation cost is 26% less than initially scoped while providing 2x the data retention history versus initial plan. The additional savings mean the team is able to pursue additional use cases while also providing crucial historical trends that were planned for other reporting systems.
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