How Motorsport.com Got Up to Speed With Self-Serve Analytics

The Company

Motorsport.com is the premier destination for news and analysis on all things racing. From IndyCar to Formula 1 to NASCAR, Motorsport.com covers racing by operating more than forty online media publications in 17 languages. Clearly, the company is a global operation.

The Challenge

Audren de Valbray, Business Manager at Motorsport.com reports that the ‘old method’ of data collection required building what the team internally called the ‘mega-spreadsheet’ that consisted of data from MailChimp, Google Spreadsheets and more. Building the spreadsheet was cumbersome and prone to human error.

Before Panoply, data collection was time-consuming, as Motorsport.com manages more than 40 Google Analytics accounts plus all their other data sources. With their legacy processes, Motorsport.com editors had to resort to hunches and intuition for their decision making.

The Solution

Motorsport.com decided to implement Panoply's smart data warehouse for their data stack needs. They reasoned:

We chose Panoply as opposed to a standard Amazon Redshift instance because we did not have a developer resource to start with and no way to maintain our own warehouse. Plus, Panoply handles the ETL process for our Mailchimp, advertising data in Google Sheets, S3 buckets, MongoDB and some of our 50+ social media accounts including Facebook and Twitter into a single location.

The company then connects Chartio directly to 60+ Google Analytics views, random CSVs, alongside various MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and the Panoply data warehouse.

The Results

The team's new data-driven method has resulted in a 30x time savings. Their Google Analytics process alone used to take 15 working days per month. With Panoply it can now be done automatically and is always up-to-date.

Panoply gives the Digital Marketing Director more time to focus on data analysis and less time reporting on it. Also, Motorsport.com's proof of concept with Panoply was a success because of the ease-of-use of the tool set. Now, editors and individuals across the company can see data and build charts in Chartio to draw custom insights for their respective teams.

With Panoply, Motorsport.com is able to achieve an easy data warehouse without the day-to-day management and overhead of maintaining it.

Start syncing and storing all your business data in minutes with Panoply.