How metrics and intuitive dashboards foster data success at Disco
We hosted an interview with our CEO and Co-founder Michael Driscoll and Kat Tomlin, Director of Business Operations at Disco to share how she uses Rill’s fast dashboards to evangelize insights and encourage data curiosity.
Below we highlighted some key benefits that showcase how Rill helps to identify and define key metrics at a growing e-commerce company.
To see the full transcript or watch the video (that includes a short demo), check out the full blog here.
Results
Operational Value
Critical alignment on metrics across all stakeholders
Technical Value
Intuitive self-serve analytics for data empowerment
Customer Value
Command center style monitoring with real-time alerting
Critical alignment on metrics across all stakeholders
Disco is building an AI-powered commerce media network that connects advertisers with high-intent shoppers at checkout and enables publishers to monetize every transaction turning post-purchase into pure profit. In her role leading business operations, inclusive of business intelligence, Kat shares that really focusing on customer experience is key.
There are numerous metrics that can matter and retail e-commerce never sleeps. “What do we care about? What is ultimately the thing that matters most?" By answering these questions, it leads to a conversation of our KPIs. What we found was some stakeholders had an understanding of checkouts being a load of our ad, but that correlates more to an impression. Or isn't a checkout an opportunity for our ad to be shown, even if it's not. So understanding how different people are interpreting this metric that we're trying to define, and then having that discussion. “Oh, that's an interesting take that you have, and kind of meshing those things, and really getting down to the core of what is truth?” We're constantly striving for having that understanding of how we've come to define metrics very specifically.
Intuitive self-serve analytics for data empowerment
No one really wants to learn a new tool. For Kat, what she prioritized is ensuring data driven tools is usable for stakeholders. "When you're evaluating tools, is this something that you, as a data driven person, are inclined to understand? People typically don't feel that agency to feel like they have the data and these understandings at their fingertips, whether you're an SDR or you're a software engineer. So Rill has changed the game for us in that regard."
“My go-to-market folks have been awesome in their adoption of Rill. It makes my day when I get a link or a screenshot from a pivot table that they've built in Rill. They immediately ask, can you confirm that I'm understanding this correctly? Have I used the right metrics? Am I comparing this to the right date range?” It was so fun to see their eyes light up with how intuitive it was to use. It was almost a terror to go into previous tools. They would say “I can't do this. I don't know how to do this. It's not delivered to me on a dashboard.” Rill fosters and almost forces the function of curiosity, which I think is ultimately going to lead to a richer understanding of the data.
Beyond ease of use, the speed of the tool can’t be compared. It takes away so many clicks and extra steps. Everything is available right here. “You have a number here, it's immediately accessible to you, but you have more than just a number displayed to you. You can see the trend over time. Great. This initiates an immediate question. What happened between September 13th and September 15th. I want to dig into that. And you can immediately expand and ultimately understand.”
Command center style monitoring with real-time alerting
How many times have you been reactive to a problem potentially that is as a result of stumbling across data points that lead you to believe? And how many times have you wished, wow that would have been great if I had been notified of this? This is why alerting was one of the first things that we enabled with Rill. When we got all of our data integrated, we knew exactly what we needed to be proactively alerted on. This allowed us to solve issues faster with a quicker turnaround time.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are like the Superbowl for e-commerce companies. Real time metrics and real time analytics is a crucial part of data strategy because so much activity is happening on the platform during that period. Based on data we've collected in the past, we start working with the engineering team. We need to have all of our systems ready for that influx of traffic. We can't have anything going down. So to be able to empower the technical teams and their preparation for those days in our infrastructure is huge. Then when it comes to the day it really is just a refresh of the data, and all of that goes back to understanding of the data for what we expect to see.
But the work doesn't stop there. It's then about the retroactive understanding of whether we hit our metrics. What went great, what went wrong. Where did we ultimately net out and aggregating all that understanding for Disco as a business and of course for our customers. By utilizing Rill’s dashboards, we are able to get an understanding of how our customers performed and how their growth looked on these important days.
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