At By Aliens, data is at the heart of the business model. It is used to manage user acquisition, ad monetization and product optimization. It is critical to the success of a mobile gaming company. To excel at these tasks, they need a robust data organization that serves the needs of internal users end-to-end.

deX worked with By Aliens to build the infrastructure required to deliver high-quality data to their marketing and finance teams. René Retz, CEO of By Aliens, said, “I knew we couldn’t just keep working with the processes we had. We needed to completely change the way we handled data, and the team could definitely use some help. The project encompassed both data infrastructure and data modeling, with the goal of eliminating current data engineering bottlenecks and providing business teams with a better set of metrics.

There was a disorganized data process and data that was structured in a difficult way. Multiple processes for the same data led to inconsistent results and hindered the ability to adapt the data model to incorporate new information collected by the business

The company tackled the problems by rethinking every step of the data lifecycle. The team began by interviewing business users and listing all the metrics they wanted and their requirements for timeliness, granularity, and slicing and dicing. They then used deX technology to improve connections to their data sources, such as ad networks, attribution platforms, Google, and Apple, and gained a deeper understanding of the data’s meaning and how it could be used to enhance each other. At the same time, they eliminated tool redundancy by migrating event collection from three different third-party software to a single, unified identifier, enabling deeper and more meaningful data connections.

The team then created a layered data model consisting of four layers: raw, cleansed, trusted, and refined. The previous data model had 34 interconnected tables and lacked several industry-standard practices: tables were completely rewritten daily, there was no use of partitions or data clustering, and the table schema did not encourage exploration, only a set of predefined metrics, filters, and groups. To address this situation, they rebuilt the data model from the ground up to not only organize the table structures, but also to provide clearer business meaning. The result was 17 new tables that processed all the information in an organized manner. Troubleshooting and maintenance became much easier. Improvements include a data model that encourages data exploration by linking it to business concepts and that can be easily updated to include new data and metrics; a suite of data validations and alerts to ensure data quality; and tables that are partitioned and clustered according to data consumption patterns, resulting in lower costs and better performance. Data processing costs to deliver the data dropped from a few thousand dollars per month to less than $100.

The company completed the project by rolling out the new pipelines to the organization. They quickly received feedback based on actual usage, allowing them to fine-tune the data lake.

The marketing and finance teams can now fully leverage the data to optimize campaign performance and improve the accuracy of accounting processes. This translates directly into increased user acquisition, revenue generation, and product development. As René explained, “We spent two years trying to improve these pipelines without success. With deX, we did it in 4 months. Now I feel in control of the business, and the business teams are happy to have the support to develop their own projects.”