Google Cloud Platform > Case Studies > Looker helps Infectious Media lift online ad campaigns by making data instantly accessible to everyone in the agency

Looker helps Infectious Media lift online ad campaigns by making data instantly accessible to everyone in the agency

Company Size

200-1,000

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom

Product

Looker

Tech Stack

SQL
Google BigQuery
MySQL

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Predictive Quality Analytics
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Data Science Services

About The Customer

Infectious Media is a UK-based company that was founded in 2008 to pioneer the use of programmatic advertising, which involves the use of computer logic to automate and optimize online ad campaigns. The company continues to innovate through proprietary technology that powers ad campaigns across 50 countries for leading brands in various sectors including travel, retail, consumer packaged goods, automotive, technology, and media. Their platform makes more than 40 billion ad decisions a day to buy more than 1 billion ad impressions per month. In addition, data analysts from Infectious Media help clients optimize their campaign performance through predictive modeling and in-depth analytics.

The Challenge

Infectious Media, a UK-based company pioneering the use of programmatic advertising, faced a challenge in accessing real-time data for campaign performance analytics. The company's fast-paced business required optimization specialists to adjust campaigns while they were still in flight. Initially, account managers wrote their own SQL queries, but mistakes often led to interruptions for data analysts. When the company shifted to having the analytics team write every query, it created a bottleneck that caused unacceptable wait times for reports and distracted data analysts from critical consulting and optimization work. The company needed a new analytics solution that offered flexible, self-service data exploration and reporting. Additionally, Infectious Media used two different databases: MySQL for billing and client reporting, and Google BigQuery for user-level data and algorithm research. The analytics team needed a solution that could provide access to both data sources and allow them to query both directly with the speed and flexibility required to optimize campaigns in flight.

The Solution

Infectious Media found Looker to be an ideal fit for their needs during a one-month trial. Looker became so popular that usage grew from the five initial users to half the company, and today, more than 80 percent of the employees use Looker. With Looker, the account management and sales teams now rely on standardized reports to instantly access the data they need, without having to struggle with SQL or wait for a data analyst. They regularly build their own dashboards, so they can quickly explore follow-up questions and make fresh discoveries on their own. Looker also allows the teams to provide excellent customer service by making it easy to provide prompt, accurate reports to their clients. Both the optimization and data analyst teams appreciate the speed of using Looker’s in-database architecture. With no need to transfer data, queries now run in one tenth of the time. And because the data analysts no longer have to write routine queries for the business units, two analysts can comfortably handle the work of six to seven people as the company continues to grow.

Operational Impact

With Looker in place, the use of data has expanded dramatically—with no increase in the size of the analytics team—and productivity has soared across the company.
The average time to produce client reports has dropped from eight hours a week down to two hours a week.
The analytics team can now focus on the more complex analysis used to improve campaign performance for clients.
Data analysts use Looker to quickly create dashboards and other dynamic reporting tools that focus on the criteria that drive customer value.
A wide range of business and technical teams use customized views to monitor status in real time and can drill down with a simple point-and-click to find out exactly why something has changed.

Quantitative Benefit

The average time to produce client reports has dropped from eight hours a week down to two hours a week.
More than 80% of employees make data-based decisions using Looker on a regular basis.