Interview: Steven McMullen, Senior Business Intelligence Manager at Stack Overflow

In order to reduce the data-prep cycle and increase productivity, Stack Overflow selected the Looker data platform.

The marketing ops team specifically uses Looker to generate leads and get new customers on board.

LookML, Looker’s data modeling language, is a different take on accessing all the data as it allows the team to speak about data in a shared language and streamline the workflow.

It allows collaboration with the finance, sales enablement and operations team because it exposes the logic they are using, metrics they are watching, the rules and parameters used for decision and it easily gives access to the data science team to integrate those into the kinds of statistical analysis of modeling and machine learning they do.

insideBIGDATA: Describe the results since implementing Looker.

Using Looker, Stack Overflow can access and manage all of its data quicker.

But the capabilities  unlocked were massive.

Stack Overflow’s marketing ops team learned that there was a lot of flexibility in how they can visualize the marketing funnel in new ways.

For example, Looker enables them to analyze conversation rates overtime as well as understand the overall health of the funnel.

It allows Stack Overflow to create visualizations to show all campaigns happening at the same time and compare in real time.

In addition, Looker can query tables, in a matter of minutes – prior to Looker, it took hours.

Users are able to access Looker data via API, and improve the value of that data because they now have additional insight.

While it used to take hours to answer a simple question like “How is this campaign performing?” Looker makes the information readily available for anyone to access.

The team can make decisions faster and use the time savings to dig into other data projects.

Using these insights allows Stack Overflow to identify exact cost of generating new leads through marketing campaigns- Ex: if they want to bring in $1M, they’ll need 1,000 leads to get there.

Those numbers allow Stack Overflow to identify the marketing dollars and type of campaign suited to generating a target number of new leads.

Sign up for the free insideBIGDATA newsletter.

.. More details

Leave a Reply