Retargetly builds a data culture with Metabase.

The Challenge: In the company’s early days, their team was searching for a BI solution that supported their Druid database.

The Solution: Retargetly chose Metabase since it had a simple user interface, was fast and easy to install, and had anengaged community on Github and Discourse.

The Results: The main benefit Retargetly got from Metabase was greater data transparency for the entire team. Metabase became a single source of truth for almost the entire team.

"We were surprised how many employees started asking their own questions about their data immediately after they picked up Metabase. 70 percent of the company uses Metabase on a regular basis. "

Federico Nieves
CTO at Retargetly

Retargetly is a data platform focused on building addressable audience solutions for brands and publishers in LATAM. They process more than 50B events every month across all LATAM countries.

Why Metabase

In the Retargetly’s early days, they were looking for an open-source BI platform that could help them query Druid, a database that specializes in real-time analytics. They chose Metabase because it was easy to install, had a simple user interface, a consistent release log on Github, and an engaged community.

They connected Metabase to their other databases, and Metabase soon became their go-to reporting tool. They created dashboards, visualizations, and queries to help everyone understand the business and products.
Though teams naturally taught each other how to find and query the data they needed, Retargetly also created some internal demos to help employees get up to speed on the data available, how to query it, and how to share it with their teams.

The data

Retargetly uses Metabase to connect Druid, MySQL, and Snowflake databases. And they process a lot of data: they analyze events from people using their websites, apps, and other platforms.

How Retargetly team uses Metabase

Common use cases include creating dashboards to understand their product and service KPIs, as well as asking questions for support or debugging, both with the graphical query builder and the SQL editor.

Typical questions include:

• How many people came from “X” country?
• What are those people interested in?
• How many users logged into their product yesterday? What about the week before?

The results

The main benefit for Retargetly was internal data transparency. Employees found their way into knowing more about how the company is making progress toward their goals just by asking questions in Metabase, “and that was awesome!”.

Retargetly’s Advices for others

• Make a Demo for all the people in the company on how to use Metabase and how to query different databases. This will save a lot of time for your teammates.
• Think about how to secure your sensitive data early on. If you have different databases and need to restrict access to some of them - standardize a process for adding new users and assigning them to groups.
• SSO is mandatory for big teams.