Even in a crowded media landscape, BuzzFeed stands out with engaging content and user experiences across pop culture, entertainment, shopping, food, and news. Part of their key advantage is their commitment to data literacy across the company, which helps them move quickly. As Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics, puts it, "Using data is a core value — even people who you wouldn’t expect use data for their role."
However, after eight years with Looker, they started to feel weighed down by their BI tool. A lack of product innovation, limited customer support, and rigid workflows made it difficult to get answers without relying on the Analytics team or exporting data to external tools. To get back to fast, data-driven decision-making, BuzzFeed migrated to Omni, enhancing the speed and accessibility of data across the company while freeing up the Analytics team’s time.
Results #
Migrated their 8-year-old Looker estate in less than three months: Launched Omni across the company, resulting in significant time savings for the Analytics team — reducing time spent on certain ad-hoc requests by up to 80%.
The Product team can now go deeper with their data using Omni: They monitor key metrics, dig into user journeys, and use alerts to proactively identify potential issues.
The Editorial team increased self-service & reduced reliance on the Analytics team: They can now answer more of their own questions right from dashboards by using period-over-period analyses, dynamic timeframe filters, and more — reducing the need for new dashboard requests.
Pain Points #
Lack of product innovation held them back from doing more with data. Product development had stagnated in their previous tool and it lacked exciting new features. BuzzFeed was also migrating to dbt and needed a tool with a deep integration to streamline their data engineering and BI workflows.
Technical barriers created bottlenecks and forced people to use other tools. While the Analytics team liked having a shared source of truth through a central data model, their existing system was too complex to maintain and update. This forced many users to seek simpler alternatives for self-service, which created new challenges.
Absence of product support and no opportunities for feedback created mistrust. A decline in customer support made it nearly impossible for BuzzFeed to get help with their previous BI tool or to provide feedback. At one point, there was a six-month period with no clear way to submit support requests.
“Our previous tool was very inflexible, which led us to find other ways of operating that weren’t ideal. Many people opted for Google Sheets or Looker Studio, but that created new problems. We couldn’t trace satellite reports, and they were difficult to maintain and update.”Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
The Challenge #
After nearly a decade using their previous BI tool, BuzzFeed’s teams faced significant frustrations due to the lack of product innovation, slow analysis workflows, and poor customer support. However, the idea of migrating to a new tool was daunting.
“We had been dissatisfied for a long time, but we were also skeptical that any tool would be exciting enough to justify a migration. I entered the search process thinking, ‘There’s no way one tool has everything we want.’” Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
Despite this skepticism, BuzzFeed began exploring tools that would enable faster self-service for all users and consolidate their data use cases into a single BI tool, rather than spreading them across multiple platforms.
The Evaluation #
Since data is essential for every role at BuzzFeed, the goal was to create a self-service environment for both technical and non-technical users.
Key criteria for evaluation included:
Ease of use: End users wanted to easily create and filter dashboards, export data, and schedule reports for delivery via email and Slack.
Consolidation of use cases: The Analytics team hoped to bring together self-service reporting, dashboards, and ad-hoc data exploration into one BI platform for improved metric consistency, traceability, and scalability.
Semantic model: Developers wanted to maintain some of their existing workflows, particularly the ability to define reusable logic in the BI layer alongside their dbt models. However, they needed a modeling workflow that was faster and more flexible.
Integrations: It was crucial to manage their data using software development lifecycle workflows, like integrations with GitHub and dbt, given the size of their team and data environment.
Customer support: BuzzFeed desired a better customer experience, with dedicated support and the opportunity to provide feedback.
“We looked at the big players like Tableau and PowerBI, but it felt like you needed to be in their ecosystem for them to make sense. We also wanted to see more rapid product development, so we quickly decided to focus on the newer, innovative players.” Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
After evaluating several tools, including legacy BI solutions and startups, BuzzFeed selected Omni.
The Migration #
Despite initial concerns about migrating to a new BI tool, the BuzzFeed team was surprised by the speed and ease of transitioning to Omni.
“Creating the Omni data model was very fast compared to what we were used to. The generation of the initial model code in Omni is so easy — instantly syncing with our warehouse and having views available saved us a lot of time. We built a lot of curated datasets (Topics) and had dashboards ready in a couple of weeks.”Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
During their migration, BuzzFeed took the opportunity to remove clutter and ultimately consolidated 2,000 dashboards to just 400 in Omni. This simplified environment aligned well with their transition to dbt, providing a clean start.
“We used the migration as an opportunity to align with stakeholders and prioritize. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t take over our jobs; our team was able to keep doing our day-to-day work throughout the process.”Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
The Impact #
In under three months, BuzzFeed successfully launched Omni across the company. The response has been overwhelmingly positive — the Analytics team has gotten a consistent volume of requests from teams eager to gain access.
The Product team gains a deeper understanding of the user journey #
Previously, product managers, designers, and engineers struggled to efficiently analyze detailed user journeys and answer specific product usage questions.
“Omni makes it much easier to track metrics and create logic to follow user journeys over time. In the past, we had to use spreadsheets to analyze specific product launches, but they were difficult to maintain. With Omni, we can spin up dashboards from individual SQL queries, allowing us to integrate product analysis that doesn’t sit easily within a data model, such as user funnels and retention. This allows our Product team to follow user journeys more easily via dashboards and filtering in the UI.”Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
With all product analytics centralized in Omni, it’s easier for the Product team to interact with data, build dashboards, add new metrics, and receive emailed reports to monitor product launches and ongoing product engagement.
“Receiving emailed reports and alerts has been key to our workflow for years. With Omni, we can add more data into those reports to alert us about changes or issues that need attention. It’s much easier to monitor our product when everything is in one place.”Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
Omni also allows the Product team to quickly zoom in on specific pieces of data without needing help from the Analytics team. For one-off analyses like product launches, the team can easily explore data in workbooks without having to wait for data to be modeled beforehand or cluttering the shared model.
The Editorial team analyzes more data independently #
The Editorial team uses Omni to self-serve key metrics like page views, time on page, and social shares without requiring additional dashboards from the Analytics team. Omni’s timeframe filters and built-in period-over-period analysis make it easy to track performance over different timeframes, all from a single dashboard and without needing to code.
“Using Omni has reduced the number of new questions and consolidated the reports our Analytics team needs to build. It’s given us time back while giving our stakeholders more independence to explore what they need.”Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
The Analytics team became more strategic with their resources and time #
In addition to ongoing reports, dashboards, and strategic work, the Analytics team also fulfills ad-hoc data requests. Previously, these requests significantly slowed down the Analytics team. Now, time-to-insight with Omni is up to 80% faster on certain ad-hoc reports.
“The ability to choose the right path for a given question has been quite powerful. Now we can handle many of these requests in an Omni workbook in 5-10 minutes, whereas previously it would require changes to the code and an extended process that could take half a day. It’s given us a lot more agency to answer questions and tackle those requests quickly.“ Lizzy Bradford, Senior Director of Analytics
Looking ahead, the team is focusing on furthering their commitment to data literacy with Omni. They plan to refine their content organization strategy to make reports easier to find, develop user-specific workflows and materials to support new user onboarding, and continue enabling teams across the organization to get answers fast.