Warehouse-native analytics webinar: 5 takeaways for data chasing teams

Whether you caught our recent deep dive into warehouse native analytics, missed parts of it, or couldn't make it at all – no worries! We've got the good stuff right here. With insights from Vijay Ganesan (founder of NetSpring), Sathya Narayanan (Senior Manager, Product Management at Optimizely), and Joe Timko (Principal Software Engineer at Optimizely), there's plenty to get excited about.

Spoiler alert: If you want to take your experimentation game to the next level by testing what matters to your business, you're in for a treat. Our experts showed how integrating directly with your data warehouse can unlock insights that drive real impact, all from your single source of truth.

5 takeaways for data chasing teams

1. The "Aha!" moment: Business impact is everything

Your experimentation program needs to drive actual business impact. Click or event-based metrics just aren't cutting it anymore.

Take this streaming service scenario: You're testing a new recommendation algorithm, and sure, counting how many times users pick movies from your recommendations seems fine... until you realize it's not telling the whole story. This view-and-play content might be killing your ad revenue as this is data captured in your warehouse or another system, not easily tracked via click or event-based metrics.

Or how about this e-commerce tale: Your personalized messages are boosting conversion rates (yay!), but what if those converts are serial returners? (not so yay!)

These returns could be happening both online and in physical stores, with that crucial data living in your warehouse. Without warehouse-native analytics, you'd miss half the story of how your digital experiments impact real-world behavior.

“If you don't trust numbers, you cannot make business decisions based on them.”

2. Stop playing data ping-pong with your teams

Gone are the days when Product Managers, Marketers, and Data teams had to play the waiting game. With Optimizely Analytics, anyone can self-serve and answer critical business questions in minutes, not weeks. (Our users' analysts are "over the moon" about this!)

Image source: Optimizely

Remember the old days? You know, when you had to:

• Call your data engineering team (again)
• Wait days (or weeks!) for every report
• Rinse and repeat for every follow-up question

Now you can get answers instantly with powerful templates like:

Experimentation scorecard

Analyze your A/B tests with all your business metrics in one place. Want to know how your latest feature impacts both user engagement AND revenue? Now you can.

Image source: Optimizely

Impact analysis

Understand how your experiments affect user behavior beyond just clicks. Track everything from subscription renewals to long-term retention – all using data already in your warehouse.

Funnel analysis

Follow your users' journey through critical paths and spot where they drop off. Better yet, compare these journeys between your experiment variants to see which experience truly works better.

Event segmentation

Slice and dice your results by any customer segment that matters to your business. Are high-value customers behaving differently? Now you'll know right away.

Image source: Optimizely

Getting started is straightforward:

• Set up your experiment variants (business as usual)
• Connect your data warehouse (one-time thing)
• Send experiment decision events to your warehouse
• Build those metrics (point-and-click easy)
• Get analyzing (instant gratification!)

Plus, we're smart about performance. The first person opens a dashboard, query runs. Next four people? They get cached results. This means fast access for everyone while optimizing your warehouse resources.

3. Security and compliance without the headaches

Your sensitive data should stay where it belongs, in your warehouse. No more splitting hairs over data discrepancies between different systems (such as Web Analytics tools like GA4), with your warehouse as your source of truth, you can trust and put your data to work confidently.

This means:

• Complete control over your data location and access
• No compromising between innovation and compliance
• Run sophisticated experiments while maintaining your security standards
• Perfect for financial institutions and organizations with strict data governance

Want to analyze how your experiments affect sensitive metrics like customer lifetime value or financial data? No problem. Since all analysis happens right in your warehouse, you maintain complete control while getting all the insights you need.

4. Choose your adventure: Two paths to analytics glory

Warehouse native scorecard

Perfect for: Experimentation teams who define success via metrics captured from different systems and stored in the warehouse.

What you get:

• Data warehouse connectors
• In-line metric definition
• Experiment scorecard results exploration
• Optimizely stats engine

Optimizely analytics

Perfect for: Product and data science teams seeking deeper insights

What you get (all of the above), plus:

• Full analytics exploration capabilities
• Customizable dashboards
• Metric builder
• Reusable cohorts and alerts

5. The future is looking pretty sweet

We're already delivering powerful capabilities like:

• Ratio metrics to measure complex business KPIs

Image source: Optimizely

• CUPED variance reduction for more precise results

Image source: Optimizely

And there's even more coming soon to a warehouse near you:

• Enhanced metrics (guardrail metrics, funnel metrics)
• Smarter interpretation (outlier smoothing)
• Better exploration tools (Event QA inspector, shareable reports)
• Advanced capabilities (warehouse native MAB, CMAB, and stats accelerator)

Wrapping up...

Ready to jump in?

You're probably ready for warehouse native analytics if:

1. You want to test against what matters (beyond those basic web metrics)
2. You're tired of waiting days for analysis (who isn't?)
3. You need one source of truth (because data arguments are so 2023)

And for all the data model enthusiasts out there, we believe in "bring your own data model."

Your setup, your rules. We adapt to you, not the other way around.

Want to see all this in action?

Check out the full webinar recording and watch our experts break it down step by step.