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DAS42 has been a transformative partner for us with our Snowflake journey. With the help of DAS42, we have been able to optimize Snowflake and see a 23% reduction in our month-over-month spend.

ZAC SHEPHERD, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING FOR DATA, BUSINESS INSIDER

News media giant Business Insider publishes original journalism and aggregated content across multiple verticals, such as business, finance, technology, and lifestyle. Founded in 2007, it operates with an online delivery model using advertising-supported and subscription-based content models.

The challenge

Business Insider was overspending on its data technologies, mainly its Google BigQuery data warehouse. The company couldn’t entirely retire BigQuery since this is the platform through which Google provides its granular Google Analytics data. Business Insider wanted to continue using other Google tools, such as Google Cloud Storage and the business intelligence tool Looker – but a data warehousing migration and executing reporting on Snowflake needed to happen while ensuring its Snowflake spend was well understood and governed.

The solution

DAS42 began the migration process by helping the advertising revenue team migrate data and reporting from BigQuery to Snowflake. We ingested new data sources, including Permutive and Salesforce, and helped migrate old workloads to Snowflake. DAS42 cleaned and transformed this data, modeling it in Snowflake and Looker so that the advertising revenue team could look at the data in new ways without resulting in excessive spending. Our dynamic processes allowed end users across verticals to query aggregated data inexpensively but still effortlessly drill down into granular datasets when necessary.

We modeled metrics that used data from multiple sources, such as page loads from Google Analytics and impressions from Google Ad Manager, helping break down tool-based silos. Finally, we audited Snowflake and found opportunities to optimize. We worked with Business Insider’s data engineers to implement weekly cost check-ins and set up custom reporting and alerts to monitor and optimize Snowflake spend.

How did it turn out?

On the business side, the advertising revenue team could now view data from Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, and Permutive side by side, including page loads, impressions, clicks, revenue, page views, and ad slots clicked. This data enabled the team to compare trends in traffic and revenue. Reporting now ran automatically on aggregated data when it could, resulting in technology cost savings.

For the data engineering team, DAS42’s assistance helped the team rein in its spend, which meant they could repurpose the budget for other use cases. We exposed disproportionate spend from certain ingestions, tools, and data science models, and once remediated, the team saw Snowflake spend reduce by 23% month over month. We also helped design data archival policies for historical data that was no longer needed, which reduced Business Insider’s monthly BigQuery storage costs by 27%.