Presented by:

Bill YetmanVP Engineering, Ancestry.com

Data Driven: The Ancestry.com Journey to Self-Service Analytics

Adam DavisData Visualization Lead, Ancestry.com

Agenda

I. About Ancestry

II. Our story

III. Challenges & solutions

IV. Successes

V. Future opportunities

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World’s largest online family history resource

4Approx. 2.7 million paid subscribers across all family history sites

Data drives our business

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●14 billion digitized historical records

●60 million family trees

●6 billion profiles

●200 million sharable photos, documents and written stories

●10 petabytes of data

●Digitized historical content

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●Digitized historical content●Tech and product experience

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●Digitized historical content●Tech and product experience●AncestryDNA

●Digitized historical content

●Tech and product experience

●AncestryDNA

●Consumer engagement

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Our storyTableau’s role in the Ancestry data strategy

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Traditional BI tool challenges●Dashboard bottleneck

- Team of 3 - Analysts wouldn’t use it- Steep learning curve

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The search for a self-service tool●Executive challenge to become a data

driven org

●Needed to move quicker with discovering and sharing insights

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Self-service options explored●Microstrategy Visual Insight

- Training- Workshops

●Microsoft Power BI POC- Power Pivot- Power View

●Tableau Evaluation- 2 week- 30 desktop users

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Tableau evaluation findings●2 weeks

●120 views created

●Excel users were quickest adopters

●Prizes Awarded- Most colorful- Most viral- Most put together

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Comment dashboard (Embedded URL)

Challenges & solutionsOvercoming the challenges of a self service model

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Adoption explodes●In 1 Year

●100 desktop licenses

●8 core CPU server license ●(Access for Everyone)

●Approx. 1350 Views

●More than 350 Workbooks

●Went from struggling with BI tool user adoption to everyone wants to use it.

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How do we avoid the “Wild West” of reporting?

Looking for a solution

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Solution

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http://getbootstrap.com/

DEMO: Approved reports portal

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“You’re doing it wrong.”

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– Chris Love June, 2014

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Get on the blogs

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-Kelly Martin

-Russel Christopher

-Ben Jones

SuccessesWins with Tableau

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PR Mother’s Day campaign

●Featured in news articles- Wall Street Journal- Washington Post- Time.com- NY Daily News

●Featured as Viz of the Day on Tableau Public

●Bullet one or paragraph heading●Paragraph 2 contains first bullet point

- Paragraph 3 contains secondary bullet

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PR Mother’s Day campaign (cont.)

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PR Mother’s Day campaign

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“Our most talked about and successful campaign.”-Matt

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Back for More

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A/B testing team

●Self Service at work- 40 requests to analytics

for A/B test analysis in 2014

- Received 3 to date- Built a dashboard in 3

days w/ Tableau Desktop

●Bullet one or paragraph heading●Paragraph 2 contains first bullet point

- Paragraph 3 contains secondary bullet

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Future opportunitiesWhat’s next

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Vision for the future●Hadoop & Hive

- Data exploration

●Adoption by additional departments in organization- Find the “Excel Jockeys” with Big .XLS workbooks- DNA Science Team

●Expand Functionality- Metric monitoring- Server tools- Future Mobile 34

# of views in 1 year: 1350

Final ThoughtsKey Takeaways

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Key Takeaways

●Get Desktop in the hands of data driven individuals.

●Find a way to consolidate approved reporting.

●Start using Tableau Public.

●Get out of your own way and let Tableau work.●Adoption should be the easiest part.

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Questions?

Thank you

Bill Yetman, byetman@ancestry.com

Adam Davis, adam.davis@ancestry.com

Follow our data journey at http://blogs.ancestry.com/techroots/

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