Learn how Kindred accelerated its growth with Keboola.
Kindred Group is a publicly-traded gambling operator with offices across four continents, offering entertainment options such as online poker, sports betting, and online casinos.
Since its founding, Kindred has experienced fast growth acquiring nine different gambling brands over the last 20 years. With over 30 million customers globally and numerous brands to manage, the Kindred team had a pressing need for a good data management system.
We hopped on a call with Andrea Alessio, Performance Marketing Analyst at Kindred Group, to see how Keboola has helped them grow their business.
Andrea is a data analyst in Kindred's marketing department. However, this role is his first deep dive into the realm of data. Before joining Kindred, Andrea worked in a customer-facing role and had virtually zero experience with the data world.
"I was doing account management, more client-facing," he explains, “I decided to transition to the data side of things, but my knowledge of all things data was pretty limited.”
Andrea's team analyzes data from the entire digital marketing ecosystem and then presents their findings to business decision-makers, offering a holistic view on company performance, how much they're spending, and the return on the ad spend.
While Andrea feels at home in his role now, it wasn’t always that way. Not only was he new to such a data-focused role, but he had never heard of Keboola before joining Kindred.
“I was introduced to Keboola on day one,” he recalls.
Thankfully, Andrea found the platform relatively easy to use, even for a newcomer to the data world.
“It's quite a complex tool, but the way it is structured makes it very user-friendly. I thought it was very well managed from a UI perspective. It’s really clean and straightforward,” he explains.
Of course, a feature-rich tool such as Keboola will have a learning curve. But that didn’t cause too many issues for Andrea, as he was able to get help fast when he ran into trouble.
“When I used it at the beginning, I had quite a few questions, but the team was very helpful and replied quickly.”
With an easy-to-use UI backed by plenty of customer support, the team at Kindred was able to get the most out of their data with Keboola.
In the age of APIs, many teams struggle with creating custom code at scale. Luckily, Kindred found a way to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Creating custom code to connect to every API is a messy, time-consuming endeavor, but often, it’s essential to improve operational efficiency.
By using Keboola to build data pipelines, Andrea and his team eliminate the need for custom coding, as the tool allows them to pull data from wherever they need it quickly.
“It’s quite convenient that you don’t have to create the APIs from scratch every time for every marketing source we use. We use so many that it’s crazy!”
Moreover, the robust architecture offered by Keboola provides peace of mind for the team, letting them focus more on data analysis without any concerns about the back-end.
“The extractors rarely break. You can schedule the orchestration, and they run, and you don’t have to worry. As opposed to writing scripts for some APIs, which is just a hell. So, it's a win-win from the start.”
This approach has saved the company time and hassle when connecting to numerous data sources instead of maintaining various APIs. Rather than developing the API and maintaining them, the team can simply schedule the extractors for Facebook and Google and then extract the data.
With these streamlined tools, Kindred quickly handled a few common problems that usually plague data teams for years.
Transferring data back and forth manually is a huge time-sink for data teams, draining the company's time and money, and human resources.
The Kindred team understood this issue only too well, as they store much of their data within their own systems, outside of Keboola. As a result, they were dealing with various stages of manual data transformation and writing to databases from scratch.
Thankfully, Keboola’s built-in features allow Andrea and his team to manipulate data with ease.
"We ship some of the data to storage just because we have the data that sits within our own system. And as for writers, I use Snowflake a lot. It’s quite convenient to have the data there.”
Now, the Kindred team can quickly make sense of its raw data and make it look impressive in the marketing stakeholders in more ways than one.
A major part of Andrea's job revolves around bringing the Kindred management actionable, easy-to-understand insights about their most effective channels, customers, and marketing efforts. In doing so, the company can drive customer retention and engagement and optimize ad spend.
Andrea soon discovered that Keboola makes it easy to transfer and transform data between your database on your visualization tool, which enabled his team to create powerful, intuitive data visualizations.
"I use Snowflake a lot in terms of the connection between Power BI. I schedule and upload a few datasets daily to Keboola, with templates we created in Keboola, and it's quite helpful."
Another asset in their work is the orchestrations tool from Keboola, which helps to schedule programming tasks automatically and pull data from sources. At this point, they can upload the data into their visualizer.
“We set up the extractor for whatever data source — it could be Facebook or Google Ads — or whatever marketing source it may be. We just schedule the extractor a few times a day and constantly add newly updated data into Power BI."
At Kindred, Keboola has become an integral part of their data workflow, and they are keen to keep it that way.
Andrea sees Keboola as the perfect tool for building data pipelines and leveraging automation in a small business or any organization. With the power of automation, the team at Kindred is managing to save 174 hours per month.
" Keboola is a no-brainer,” he asserts, “It will help you automate most, if not all of your daily tasks, from day one.”
With Keboola as an integral part of their data stack going forward, the Kindred Group's data team looks forward to leveraging its features as their company continues to grow.
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