TeamSnap: Supercharging digital marketing with Google BigQuery and Tableau
About TeamSnap
TeamSnap has taken the organization of sports into the 21st century. 15 million coaches, administrators, players and parents use TeamSnap to manage everything from communication and scheduling to registration and payment collection.
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About Tableau Software
Tableau (NYSE: DATA) helps people see and understand data. From enterprises to small businesses, more than 70,000 customer accounts around the world use Tableau to turn data into actionable insights.
To transform digital marketing impact, TeamSnap combined Google Analytics 360 with Google BigQuery and Tableau for big data analysis, resulting in millions of dollars in revenue.
Google Cloud Results
- Achieves 200% ROI in 2 days by reallocating $300,000 in underperforming ad spend
- Reallocates over $10 million in ad spend per year to grow the business faster
- Improves customer engagement, generating $4 million in additional customer value each year
Now serving 15M+ users in 195 countries
Anyone who has ever coached or played on a sports team, or had a child involved in sports, knows how difficult scheduling and logistics can be. From game and practice schedules, to uniforms and who’s bringing the snacks, it can be a lot for coaches, administrators, parents, and players to manage. It’s no wonder that TeamSnap, a sports team, club, and tournament management app, has exploded in popularity worldwide. By syncing events to everyone’s personal calendars and providing messaging and payment tracking, TeamSnap makes communication and organization easy.
TeamSnap markets its app to coaches, players, and clubs via targeted YouTube ads. It also uses Google AdWords and DoubleClick to advertise on search results and run programmatic campaigns. These methods have been highly effective, helping TeamSnap grow to millions of users worldwide and become one of the most popular apps in the iOS app store.
“Before Google Analytics 360, Google BigQuery, and Tableau, tracking our return on ad spend was difficult because we had so much data. We don’t have that problem anymore because we’ve moved to real-time reporting. We find additional revenue growth opportunities almost daily.”
—Ken McDonald, Chief Growth Officer, TeamSnapAs its business and data grew, TeamSnap was challenged to track ROI and measure the customer journey across channels and devices over time. The company’s marketing budget grew quickly, making it even more important to spend wisely. With data in Google Analytics 360, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, Google AdWords, and Salesforce, TeamSnap needed a way to link and correlate those data sources in a scalable, timely, and cost-effective way to understand the true impact of its digital marketing across websites and mobile apps.
To avoid the painstaking manual process of pulling data from multiple sources, TeamSnap began using Google Analytics 360, which integrates with Google BigQuery, to provide a fully managed big data analysis service. TeamSnap analyzes the data using Tableau, which connects directly to Google BigQuery for fast analytics and helps the company share and collaborate on that information with self-service ease.
The combination allows TeamSnap to easily track the activity of millions of users with self-service ease, without worrying about the scalability or availability of the big data platform.
“Before Google Analytics 360, Google BigQuery, and Tableau, tracking our return on ad spend was difficult because we had so much data,” says Ken McDonald, Chief Growth Officer at TeamSnap. “We didn’t always have insights to make the best choices. We don’t have that problem anymore because we’ve moved to real-time reporting. We find additional revenue growth opportunities almost daily.”
“Using Google Analytics 360 and Google BigQuery with Tableau to track our return on ad spend is ideal. It’s easy to use SQL to query the data or explore it with drag-and-drop ease. Using these tools, we immediately reallocated $300,000 of ad spend that was performing poorly, generating 200% ROI in the first two days.”
—Ken McDonald, Chief Growth Officer, TeamSnapMaking ad dollars work harder
TeamSnap now automatically imports unsampled Google Analytics 360 logs into the Google BigQuery data warehouse. To import data from other sources such as Google AdWords, DoubleClick, and YouTube, TeamSnap uses Google BigQuery Data Transfer Service. With all relevant data consolidated in Google BigQuery, TeamSnap can use Tableau to perform advanced analytics on its digital marketing, executing ad-hoc analyses in seconds, while eliminating data sampling issues, to improve accuracy. These analyses can also be reused and shared with internal and external stakeholders via Tableau Online, promoting governed reuse and consistency.
“Using Google Analytics 360 and Google BigQuery with Tableau to track our return on ad spend is ideal,” says Ken. “It’s easy to use SQL to query the data or explore it with drag-and-drop ease.”
With Google BigQuery, Ken and his team can bring all the data from the TeamSnap billing systems, internal CRM, and other Google services into one straightforward dataset that everyone uses. With Tableau, users are able to perform self-service analytics on this data and provision analyses via shared dashboards that communicate the same consistent truth across the company. These dashboards provide a single view of the business to discover new patterns and questions worth analyzing.
All of this results in enormous time savings because no one is re-inventing the wheel. “Using these tools, we immediately reallocated $300,000 of ad spend that was performing poorly, generating 200% ROI in the first two days,” says Ken.
Ken now spends his time analyzing data instead of trying to pull it all together, identifying pockets of inefficient spend in real time and reallocating those marketing dollars toward better performing campaigns. “Before, we could only focus on the largest campaign-level datasets because it was so time consuming to pull the data,” he says. “With Google BigQuery and Tableau, we can examine our advertising ROI much more granularly and reallocate more than $10 million in ad spend annually to grow the company faster and more efficiently.”
“Integration between Google Analytics 360 and Google BigQuery is seamless, giving us much more confidence in our A/B testing. We’re constantly finding new and interesting ways to use our digital marketing data. Often, making a simple change can increase revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”
—Ken McDonald, Chief Growth Officer, TeamSnapMore effective A/B testing
To make sure it is delivering the best customer experiences, TeamSnap uses Google Optimize to run A/B tests on its website. It uses Google BigQuery and Tableau to verify and supplement these findings by measuring longer-term customer behavior across devices, spanning both web and mobile apps.
By pulling in data from Google Optimize, Google Analytics 360, Salesforce, and in-house billing and CRM systems, and understanding it with Tableau, TeamSnap has increased the accuracy and effectiveness of its A/B testing, gaining a more complete picture of customer onboarding and activity. In some cases, it found that short-term indicators it previously trusted were actually poor predictors of long-term behavior.
“Integration between Google Analytics 360 and Google BigQuery is seamless, giving us much more confidence in our A/B testing,” says Ken. “We’re constantly finding new and interesting ways to use our digital marketing data. Often, making a simple change can increase revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”
Improving product quality
TeamSnap also uses Google BigQuery and Tableau to improve its own product, tracking customer activity at such a granular level that usability and functionality issues can be exposed and addressed faster. It’s also increasing customer engagement by verifying that potential customers are coming in through the right onboarding path—for example, a coach versus a player, or a consumer versus a club or other sports business. Using A/B testing to make sure customers are routed to the appropriate flow, TeamSnap drove $4 million in additional customer value each year.
“We initially chose Google BigQuery and Tableau to help with marketing, but we realized quickly that they could help us on the product side as well,” says Ken. “Most of the testing we do is about making things better and easier for our customers, and we’re accelerating that process with Google BigQuery and Tableau.”
Powerful collaboration tools
To further enhance its digital marketing efforts by empowering its distributed workforce to communicate and collaborate, TeamSnap relies on Google Workspace apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, Sheets, and Slides. Employees can collaborate on marketing presentations in real time and use the Tableau web data connector to Google Sheets to pull in financial data. That makes it easy for the TeamSnap marketing team to compute critical metrics, such as lifetime customer value and customer acquisition cost, to verify that tactical optimizations are making an impact.
“With Google Workspace, we have dramatically improved productivity,” says Ken. “We can have vibrant discussions while collaborating on a Google Doc before we schedule a meeting. By the time the meeting starts, we have the tactical business already handled and documented on Google Slides for all to see. It’s a big time saver.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About TeamSnap
TeamSnap has taken the organization of sports into the 21st century. 15 million coaches, administrators, players and parents use TeamSnap to manage everything from communication and scheduling to registration and payment collection.
About Tableau Software
Tableau (NYSE: DATA) helps people see and understand data. From enterprises to small businesses, more than 70,000 customer accounts around the world use Tableau to turn data into actionable insights.