Fivetran helps Beachbody power up its marketing and revenue analytics

Key results

• Enable real-time reporting by leveraging Fivetran connectors to ingest data from 95+ data sources and databases 
• Saved weeks of engineering time by automating data pipelines 
• Significantly reduced data ingestion and reporting time from hours to minutes

Data stack

Pipeline: Fivetran

Sources: 95+ 

Destination: Snowflake

Real-time data for real-time reporting

Beachbody is the creator of some of the world’s most popular fitness programs, including Insanity® and P90X®. It has transformed the in-home fitness market by making its programs accessible for people anytime, anywhere. BODi is Beachbody’s newest digital subscription-based platform that lets its customers create tailored workout plans and meal plans. 

Beachbody strives to provide its customers with an agile and highly personalized experience on BODi. Its analytics team makes this possible with real-time reporting and advanced predictive analytics on customer behavior. It collects data on order trends, billing, revenue, marketing effectiveness, product launch performance and much more.

"We want to react to customer behavior instantaneously. Leveraging Fivetran increased our ability to obtain real-time data from our most critical data sources. With Fivetran, we aim to track customer orders right from the time they are placed. This empowers our teams to deliver personalized experiences while continuing to reduce the data transformation, processing and reporting time considerably."
- Aarthi Sridharan, VP Data Insights & Analytics

The challenge 

Over the past two decades, Beachbody has experienced rapid growth, expanding its operations into new markets, creating multiple new business units and transitioning from direct marketing to digital marketing.

The byproduct of this exponential growth was multiple data warehouses, numerous data sources and a few different ETL tools tailored to meet various needs. This gave birth to some classic data challenges: 

1. Scalability: Managing and keeping track of all its data sources was a big challenge. Beachbody’s data infrastructure comprised three distinct data warehouses, over 90 data sources, multiple ETL tools and various other components. 
2. Lack of visibility: Analysts spent more time trying to understand where data resides rather than analyzing it, hindering the ability to provide near real-time insights to internal stakeholders. 
3. Data integrity: Due to data silos, analysts had to ensure that data from various sources and applying different transformations and methodologies would not lead to any discrepancies. 

Two years ago, Beachbody initiated its cloud transformation initiative with the goal of overcoming these challenges and streamlining their data infrastructure to facilitate data-driven decision making throughout the organization. After careful consideration, the team chose Fivetran as its data movement solution. 

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Prior to Fivetran, Beachbody used numerous legacy ETL tools, each responsible for integrating data from different data sources. A dedicated data engineer would develop custom pipelines and manually configure change data capture (CDC) and incremental syncs, Beachbody wanted an out of the box solution. It was cumbersome and couldn’t scale to meet the expanding needs of the business. 

"We wanted to proactively avoid the upkeep of data pipelines and managing multiple tools which could have resulted in numerous reliability and data trust issues."- Aarthi Sridharan, VP Data Insights & Analytics

Beachbody’s goal was not only to save costs or valuable time for data engineers, but also reduce data downtime for the company. Fivetran helped consolidate its ETL toolstack into one, enabling the team to continue to deliver trustworthy data to stakeholders quickly.

“When connecting a new data source, our first response is to check if Fivetran offers a native out-of-the-box connector for that source. By automating pipelines, we empower our engineering teams to allocate their time towards strategic initiatives, such as creating data marts to expedite analysis or supporting specific projects like revenue analysis.” – Hari Krishnan Umapathy, Senior Manager, Data Engineering, Beachbody

Fueling direct marketing projects 

Fivetran plays a vital role in fueling their direct marketing project by centralizing custom reports from key sources such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Pinterest and more. This enables Beachbody’s marketing teams to have real-time on customer behavior during a new product launch.

“This consolidated data enables us to address important questions like the effectiveness of our marketing strategy, optimal allocation of ad dollars, identification of the most impactful channels and strategic ad pivoting,” says Aarthi. 

A powerful dashboard for Beachbody’s leadership 

The organization’s corporate dashboard, owned and maintained by the analytics team, serves as a crucial resource for multiple teams. Marketing teams rely on it for daily sales reporting, executive teams use it to make decisions and finance teams utilize it for monthly reporting. This dynamic dashboard is updated multiple times a day.

Fivetran plays a pivotal role in centralizing data from essential sources, including Oracle EBS, Stripe, Salesforce, Google Ads and many more. Automated pipelines and its robust sync frequency powers the corporate dashboard, enabling the tracking of core KPIs and metrics and providing valuable insights to C-level executives for informed strategic decision making.

Faster and more accurate revenue analysis 

Ensuring accuracy is the analytics team's utmost priority when serving finance teams with accounting or revenue data. Hari Krishnan Umapathyi's team is responsible for gathering billing, payments and subscriptions data across Beachbody’s various business lines. This comprehensive data is crucial for conducting revenue analysis, aiding critical decisions and monitoring the performance of specific business lines. 

“Fivetran out-of-the box connector was quick to set up and helped us quickly get to the revenue analysis part versus building custom pipelines. By using Fivetran's connectors, we saved 2-3 sprints per connector that we would have otherwise needed to build our own. Furthermore, Fivetran's intuitive user interface has contributed to the team's smooth adoption and utilization of the platform."
- Hari Krishnan Umapathy, Senior Manager of Data Engineering

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