Pleo Leaves Data Integration to Fivetran, Builds Out Beautiful BI

Key Takeaway

With Fivetran, Pleo gains access to richer data sets from its existing business applications and quickly adds new sources. To maintain its current data stack, the business would need to hire three additional engineers. Performance dashboards drive decisions and a marketing attribution dashboard gives the business a holistic view of channel touchpoints so it no longer relies on last-touch attribution.

Data Stack

• Data Pipeline: Fivetran
• Sources: Facebook Ad Account, Facebook Ad Insights, Twitter Ads, Google Ads, HubSpot, Intercom, LinkedIn Ad Analytics, Stripe, Webhooks
• Destination: BigQuery
• BI tool: Metabase

Pleo is a smart company card solution that decentralises company spending, automates expense reports and reimbursements, and simplifies bookkeeping. Headquartered in Denmark with offices around the EU, Pleo has been growing rapidly since it was founded in 2015. To keep up with the growth, the business required a more scalable, efficient data architecture.

Pleo had a Postgres database that stored all of its data and custom integrations for HubSpot and Intercom. The maintenance for both APIs required approximately 50% of one full-time employee’s time. The business needed to centralize its raw customer event data from Segment as well as the data from its various applications into a central data warehouse to efficiently run queries.

Fivetran Saves Pleo From Hiring Three Additional Engineers

After choosing BigQuery as its warehouse, Pleo evaluated methods for data ingestion, including building internally or buying a solution. Fivetran stood out as the clear win fo r Pleo Product Manager, Jakob Kristensen: “Fivetran keeps the API integrations up-to-date, has high-frequency syncs and pulls in all of the data available: we couldn’t live with a solution that covers 90% of the available API. We need 100% coverage. There are not a lot of providers in the market that could do this deep API integrations. We also like the transformations and webhooks features.”

Pleo can now run queries on all of its application, event and microservices data in BigQuery. “Oftentimes we need to query something about a customer that involves CRM data that we need to cross-query with Intercom, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads or our own microservices data, for example. Our new setup enables that BI,” says Kristensen.

The business no longer has to worry about maintaining its Intercom and HubSpot connectors and has brought on additional business applications with ease. Kristensen explains:

“We have access to more sources and to richer data within the sources. For example, Fivetran imports history tables from HubSpot. That is millions of rows of historical data that we couldn’t explore as easily before. The alternative to Fivetran would be to hire approximately three data engineers to work full-time on our integrations.”

Rather than building data pipelines, Pleo’s data engineers are now building data transformations:

“Fivetran has freed up our data engineers to work on building out a beautiful BI infrastructure with clean transformation layers on top of the raw data. By running transformations on raw data, we can load our queries faster, cleaner and ultimately scale our business in a better way.”

Building Marketing & Performance Dashboards

Performance dashboards are becoming the norm across departments. One dashboard, for example, displays performance-based customer support tickets per person, country, resolution time, etc. Each salesperson has their own dashboard to visualize how they’re performing compared to their targets.

Pleo’s multi-touch marketing attribution dashboard helps the business gain deeper insight into the source of revenue. While in the past it relied on last-touch attribution, the marketing team now has a more holistic view of all the touchpoints and how each channel contributes. It is answering questions such as:

• What is the customer acquisition cost?
• How much revenue did the customer generate?
• If a customer has interacted with support on Intercom, what portion of revenue can be attributed to the support team?

If your business needs an easier way to centralize data and improve insights, start your free Fivetran trial or register for a personalized demo today.

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 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 Metabase: Metabase is an open source business intelligence tool.