Key Takeaways
- The business can now analyze large CSV files faster by putting them into a database, as well as produce client-facing reports.
- The team can now efficiently handle ad-hoc client requests — formerly a time-consuming process.
- The company can easily add new connectors and build dashboards based on client needs.
- Without Fivetran, the business estimates that it would need a full-time developer and a full-time DBA.
- Pulling reports, once slow and resource-intensive, is now instantaneous.
Data Stack
- Pipeline: Fivetran
- Sources: Campaign Manager, FTP, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Snapchat Ads
- Destination: Snowflake
- BI Tool: Power BI
Dallas-based Moroch is a full-service advertising agency providing media buying, performance analysis and field marketing to clients. The business prides itself on developing close relationships with clients and providing transparent data and actionable insights. Moroch works with a number of household names across a variety of industries, including McDonald’s, Six Flags and Midas, just to name a few.
Seeking Cost- and Time-Saving Solutions
Prior to Fivetran, Moroch worked with a company that provided it with a data lake married to a visualization tool. “The BI team would have to go in, extract data, put it into Excel and create its own visuals,” explains Leon Richard, Lead Data Strategist at Moroch. “It was not a very efficient process. We wanted a BI tool to handle all of those visualizations.”
In order to take its reporting and BI capabilities to the next level, Moroch knew it needed to gain control over its own data and be able to put it in a client-friendly format. But the BI team knew that doing this internally would involve cleaning the large amounts of data the business works with. Additionally, writing the codes to connect to APIs would have been both cost and time prohibitive.
Opening the Door to New Data Capabilities With Fivetran
The business started investigating companies that could provide a bridge between its APIs and its warehouse. It started by looking at all-in-one BI solutions but realized quickly that it wanted access to the raw data, not just the visualization. Moroch found that Fivetran was the best solution for its needs and that it was more cost-effective than other solutions.
Moroch was able to connect its sources to Fivetran very easily. “We had five or six different APIs that we needed to connect to immediately and a couple of different CSV files on an FTP,” Richard says. “We connected to our FTP site as well as all of our internal platforms and we were getting data in no time. The on-boarding experience was quite pleasant.”
“Fivetran has opened us up to new capabilities that weren’t possible before,” explains Richard. “Now we can analyze very large CSV files, put them into a database and produce client-facing reports. We can do ad hoc dashboards and random client requests. Before it was difficult to manage and ingest millions of rows of data but now it has become an automated task.”
Finding a Strong Partner in Snowflake
At the suggestion of Fivetran, Moroch moved from its original warehouse, which it wasn’t satisfied with, to Snowflake to gain efficiency. “We’ve had a really good experience with Snowflake so far. It took us almost no time to make the transition,” Richard says.
For Moroch, relationships with clients are extremely important, and Moroch has similar relationships with its vendors. “We want our vendors to understand what we are looking to achieve and to partner with us throughout the process. Snowflake has done that. We have a strong relationship with our rep as well as the engineer that helped us with some of the initial concepting,” Allen Whitaker, Director of Business Insights at Moroch, explains.
Creating Client-Facing Reports With Centralized Data
Fivetran has helped take a load off the IT Department at Moroch. If the business had decided to build connectors in-house, IT would have been involved in creating and maintaining APIs and managing API changes. With clients using varying data sources, the need for a new API connection can arise at any time. “When we get a new ad hoc request from a client we’re able to easily tap into available data sources without having to go build that API bridge. Fivetran has allowed us to be efficient by helping us streamline our systems”. Without Fivetran, the business estimates that it would need a full-time developer and a full-time DBA. In addition to providing near-instant API connections, Fivetran is part of a much more cost-effective model to serve clients.
Not only is the business saving on costs, but it is able to deliver on reports and insights faster to bring more value to clients. “To be able to generate a standardized report in minutes, the difference is night and day,” Allen explains. “I would say in the past it could have taken us an hour or more to extract and report on data from the previous database, depending on how complex the request was, whereas now it’s virtually instantaneous.”
With Fivetran and Snowflake, Moroch has achieved the efficiency, flexibility and scalability it was looking for. “If client requests come in that are not necessarily part of the original data visualization scope we have the ability to review and restructure the data to achieve the insights we need,” Whitaker explains.
Data Transparency That Drives Trust
The business is ramping up its client-facing dashboards and heading towards having around 200+ users on Power BI, up from a couple of dozen internal users currently. The client-facing dashboards will give clients access to their data and performance to further increase transparency.
“With our modern data stack our clients trust us even more,” Richard explains. “Recently a client had some ad hoc requests and trusted us with our systems more than they did their own internal systems. It is a kudos to us and a kudos to Fivetran for ingesting data that in the past would have been challenging and time-consuming for us to do in-house. We’re seeing more and more clients sending us massive amounts of data and requesting a relatively quick turn-around to drive key business decisions.”
While the agency has always been known for being data-driven, its modern data stack enables it to be more nimble and to give clients insights and reports more quickly. “With our current data set-up, we are able to transparently connect the dots between media spend and business performance, and react to client requests and answer questions in a timely fashion”. Whitaker says. “It is allowing us to continue to develop, improve and monitor our media buys and clients’ business, making us better custodians of our clients' media budgets. We are building infrastructure not just for the present but for the future.”
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About Fivetran: Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology is the smartest, fastest way to replicate your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance cloud warehouse. Fivetran connectors deploy in minutes, require zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes — so your data team can stop worrying about engineering and focus on driving insights.
About Snowflake: Snowflake is the only data warehouse built for the cloud, enabling the data-driven enterprise with instant elasticity, secure data sharing and per-second pricing, across multiple clouds. Snowflake combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Snowflake: Your data, no limits.
About Power BI: Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics solution that enables users to visualise data and generate and share insights.
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