Brandwatch: Igniting the conversation for socially active brands
About Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a digital consumer insights company based in Brighton, UK. It helps businesses understand the conversations customers have about their brands, with detailed analysis of its massive social media database.
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About Fivetran
Fivetran is a zero-maintenance, fully managed data pipeline that helps analysts replicate data into cloud warehouses in minutes.
Brandwatch revolutionized its internal Business Intelligence by replacing manual reporting with the Fivetran managed data pipeline built on BigQuery.
Google Cloud results
- Doubles previous estimates of the true number of active users
- Transmits up-to-date, company-wide KPIs that help teams align on goals across departments
- Enables instant data segmentation for more sophisticated analysis
Saves 44 hours a week by automating manual reports
Companies increasingly need to better understand how customers perceive their products, so they often turn to social media for the answer. But it can be difficult to make sense of the massive data sets of real-time social media information streaming in from photographs, tweets, videos, and even messages across review forums. The Brandwatch social media intelligence platform helps brands decipher online sentiment so companies can understand more about what their customers really want.
"We have access to the world's largest index of publicly available social media data," explains Edward Mancey, Head of Business Intelligence at Brandwatch. "Using our own in-house tools, we can analyze that to help clients understand the conversations around their brands or to dig deep into topics of interest."
"We had a bottleneck. We were manually combining data from Mixpanel, Salesforce, and our own uploads on spreadsheets, but it was slow and ineffective. We needed something faster and ready to spot customers in need of help, inform our design process, and help us make better decisions."
—Edward Mancey, Head of Business Intelligence, BrandwatchTo better understand and support clients' needs, Brandwatch runs sophisticated Business Intelligence (BI) to see trends and patterns in the way the platform is used. To create a more complete view of its clients' needs, the company combined service usage data from Mixpanel with customer data in Salesforce. Unfortunately, its existing infrastructure didn't support this in the way they needed.
"We had a bottleneck," says Ed. "We were manually combining data from Mixpanel, Salesforce, and our own uploads on spreadsheets, but it was slow and ineffective. We needed something faster and ready to spot customers in need of help, inform our design process, and help us make better decisions."
Creating automated reports in an instant
Immediate and accurate analytics insights are more and more important for companies looking to compete in a data-driven marketplace. But Brandwatch's data lived in disparate silos that required manual, time-consuming aggregation, so insights were less useful by the time the data was pulled together for analysis. The company was unable to analyze customer information together with data on how customers used its platform. This meant that the BI team had to manually combine both types of information on spreadsheets in order to create reports.
"We were using spreadsheets to create our internal reports, and they were taking anywhere from a whole day to an entire week to produce," says Ed. "They were also incredibly inflexible. Once reports were made, we couldn't segment them by region or size of account. And the more information we wanted to know about a specific feature or event, the more time it would take."
"As analysts, we want to learn. But we don't learn when we compile the same reports week in, week out. Google BigQuery silently builds those reports, without our even thinking about it. That frees us up to dive deeper into the data, with more interesting questions and more sophisticated insights."
—Edward Mancey, Head of Business Intelligence, BrandwatchBecause putting reports together on spreadsheets was so time-consuming and inflexible, it limited the analysis Brandwatch could do. The team started to look for a way to build a real-time pipeline ready to deliver data fast, in a flexible form. "We were using Google Cloud already for some of our services," says Ed. "It was a no-brainer to stay with Google Cloud and have all our infrastructure in one location. Within ten minutes of meeting our implementation partner Fivetran, we had put together a rudimentary build on Google Cloud."
Using Fivetran's fully managed data pipeline solution, Brandwatch connected to BigQuery with just a few clicks to receive gigabytes of user event and commercial data from Mixpanel and Salesforce. Then it analyzed the data and ran SQL queries to gain as much valuable insight as possible, such as what behaviors denote client success. With a simple setup wizard, the team connected BigQuery to Looker as a data analytics platform to parse the combined information.
"As analysts, we want to learn," says Ed. "But we don't learn when we compile the same reports week in, week out. Google BigQuery silently builds those reports, without our even thinking about it. That frees us up to dive deeper into the data, with more interesting questions and more sophisticated insights."
Aligning the organization around shared KPIs
The dramatically improved BI has had a major impact for core members of the company's Customer Success team. "They can work with a much more holistic understanding of the way clients behave," says Ed. "That makes them a lot more responsive to their needs. The reports help us identify everything from customer satisfaction with the brand promise, to any potential gaps in the buyer journey, and how clients are performing against their industry. With these reports, our Customer Success Managers can decide how best to help clients."
The tools are changing the wider company, too. "We now have constantly updated company-wide KPIs up on big screens in the office," says Ed. "Where previously teams might have worked at cross purposes, now they refer to those common KPIs and align around them. They're a concrete, commonly agreed reference that brings us together."
"We now have constantly updated company-wide KPIs up on big screens in the office. Where previously teams might have worked at cross purposes, now they refer to those common KPIs and align around them. They're a concrete, commonly agreed reference that brings us together."
—Edward Mancey, Head of Business Intelligence, BrandwatchFreeing up time to add value where it matters most
Thanks to the new data pipeline, Brandwatch saves four hours every week that would be spent creating weekly reports, and a further 40 hours for each regular in-depth report. "I'd say I've got my Mondays back," says Ed. "With Fivetran and BigQuery, things like segmenting data are now instant. One year ago, creating these reports was pretty much all I would work on, but now I can just let it run, while I look at more efficient ways to add value. A whole new level of analytics is suddenly possible. It's a very exciting time."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a digital consumer insights company based in Brighton, UK. It helps businesses understand the conversations customers have about their brands, with detailed analysis of its massive social media database.
About Fivetran
Fivetran is a zero-maintenance, fully managed data pipeline that helps analysts replicate data into cloud warehouses in minutes.