Outshine

Outshine, an agency focused on helping marketing teams, has a different use case than many Stitch customers. Rather than just work with their own data, they help other companies analyze marketing data, optimize advertising campaigns, and increase revenue. Their expertise in advertising and analytics lets them connect data from digital advertising, CRM, and marketing automation data sources to create a single point of truth for their customers' data-driven insights.

A key part of the process, says Saadat Qadri, analytics practice lead at Outshine, is setting up data warehouses for clients that are populated with data from multiple data sources. Working with a cloud data warehouses' graphical administration interfaces would be a time-consuming process, and one they'd have to go through for each new client. "We wanted to programmatically set up a data warehouse for our clients using an API. We were impressed by how the Stitch Connect API could help us do that."

Stitch Connect is a toolkit that enables users to build data integrations into their own platforms and programmatically manage Stitch data pipelines. With it, "we were able to build prefab data warehouses as a turnkey solution," Qadri says. "Since we use the same workflow for all of our clients, it's like a template that we have. It's a really neat solution."

Qadri notes that it's hard to assess advertising campaign performance by using data from individual ad platforms that are siloed from each other. "We need to build complex views of the customer, so we need a lot of data to be able to see every stage of the marketing and sales funnel. If you only have access to one platform, you don't have access to the full range of data you need. We don't just record whether the customer is downloading a form, we go all the way to determine whether the user is converting to a paying user."

LinkedIn Ads are an important platform for Outshine's B2B clients, so the company collaborated with Stitch on a LinkedIn integration, with Outshine helping to design the schema and Stitch doing the coding. "Before we had that, the client would have to log in to LinkedIn, download data to a CSV file, manipulate it, and upload it to their data warehouse. Now that we can automatically pull LinkedIn data, it allows us to build complex views of the customer. That, in turn, allows us to provide more meaningful insights to marketing leaders. It removes the likelihood of errors you can introduce from manual manipulation of data. It saves clients a ton of time, so teams can focus on big-picture strategy, not pulling data together."

Qadri sees Stitch's ability to quickly develop new integrations as a big positive. "Not a lot of other ETL vendors can do this. By working with Stitch, we have access to not only advertising performance data but entire sets of sales and marketing data in the data warehouse."

Using Stitch allows Outshine to spend more time on what it does best. "We pride ourselves on the accuracy of our data and our analytics. Time to accurate insights is our value prop — getting to inaccurate or incomplete data isn't useful. The time we spend building data pipelines takes away from time delivering high-impact reporting. Now that we're using Stitch to set up and manage clients' data ingestion, it takes minutes to build these reports, where it used to take hours. So now we have both more time and more accuracy."

Qadri is especially happy with how well Stitch has supported Outshine during the development of the LinkedIn integration and development of the Stitch Connect proof of concept. "Anytime we reached out we've had incredible success. There have been glitches, and whenever we reach out we've gotten a solid response from the CS team, and not just a canned response. They've been able to help us get to answers for our clients."

In summary, Qadri says, "Time is a really important asset for everyone today. Being able to make effective use of time not worrying about whether data is flowing, but actually being able to use the data, is the real prize."