Yardzen clears its ETL headache with Fivetran's Free Plan

Key results:

• Yardzen is now on Fivetran's Free Plan*, enabling them to automate ELT for their sources at no cost.
• In minutes, Yardzen's data engineering team-of-one set up worry-free data pipelines, enabling her and her teammates to focus on value-driving opportunities - not building and maintaining pipelines.
• Saved a month in implementation time to build its own marketing and advertising connectors, allowing Yardzen to build an attribution dashboard in under a week.
• Reduced weeks of coding work and maintenance time for every new connector the business set up.

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Background:

• Industry: Landscaping
• Company Size: 150
• Departments supported: Marketing, Business Operations, Leadership 
• Sources: Twitter Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads, Zendesk, Bing Ads, Quickbooks, SFTP‍
• Destination: Google BigQuery‍
• Cloud Platform: Google Cloud Platform‍
• Use cases: Marketing Analytics, Finance Analytics
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Founded in 2018, Yardzen is an online landscape design firm that pairs homeowners with talented landscape designers to create yard designs that are tailor-made. The multi-million business has changed the landscape design and build process by delivering a fundamentally better experience to homeowners and contractors alike.

Yardzen’s Data Engineering Lead Andrea Kyrala is responsible for integrating data from the company’s numerous SaaS tools and product databases into BigQuery as well as establishing a flexible and secure data architecture — which includes sourcing, pipeline creation and maintenance. 

“It’s half engineering, half data. I wear a lot of hats!” says Andrea.

Before Fivetran

Prior to Fivetran, Andrea was spending weeks digging through API documentation to build custom pipelines to BigQuery in-house. Every pipeline built meant a sizable time investment — and the ETL pipelines Andrea built were brittle and often required time-intensive maintenance.

Analysts and marketers were manually exporting individual reports from each marketing platform to understand ad and marketing performance — a painstaking and time-consuming process that made it difficult for leadership to gain a single, unified view of advertising spend and performance across platforms.

“If you're spending money and you don't know exactly what you're spending it on, it's a big deal for a small company.” — Andrea Kyrala

Often, Andrea didn’t have the time for complex transformation and cleanup that would ultimately save the business analyst time in the backend.

“I've been an analyst and it's so irritating to work with data that isn't quite organized right,” says Andrea. “So we needed to find a solution that would allow us to have clean, usable and reliable data sets.”

Fivetran solution and outcomes

Implementation of Fivetran was quick and easy. In a matter of minutes, Andrea was able to connect the firm’s Google, Twitter, Bing and Pinterest Ads sources to centralize advertising spend data. 

Key outcomes include:

• Setting up a modern data stack for the first time, on a budget and with minimal engineering effort, enabling the business to scale its analytics function.
• Building an attribution dashboard and model with the data that Fivetran provides, benefiting multiple teams within the business and enabling rapid leadership decisions.
• Reprioritizing marketing spend across channels to rapidly and effectively prioritize its advertising dollars.
• Having an accurate picture of its invoice statuses, giving the leadership team more confidence in making accurate financial decisions. 

Cost is a big concern for any fast scaling business. With Fivetran's Free Plan*, Yardzen saved an inordinate volume of engineering time on a tight budget. 

The Yardzen team has seen immediate return on their investment with Fivetran. Andrea now focuses her time on projects that generate value for the business — scaling far beyond what she was previously capable of as a team of one. 

With the support of a business analyst, Andrea is building a complex conversion funnel that identifies and groups user profiles into households, determines customers who are more likely to purchase, and looks at the efficacy of marketing in targeting those customers — all projects that will generate business value for years to come.

*Yardzen was formally on our Standard Select plan, which became free on February 1st, 2023. Read the announcement!

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