Ancestry.com has tons of user data from its 2.7 million subscribers, and it created a new Marketing Infrastructure group within its organization to handle it all, with team members who have the IT expertise, marketing skills and analytics know-how to work closely with all of those individual groups.
In the past, Ancestry.com had been trying to solve its data issues by buying lots of new software solutions, but that led to staff training problems, difficulty in reporting success and ultimately resulted in a lot of untimely, messy and unreliable data, according to Ancestry.com architect/data manager Spencer Curtis, who presented on the topic at the Teradata ONE Marketing Festival in Las Vegas this week.
“Inside our organization, we had marketing, analytics and IT groups, but we wanted a separate, hybrid 
IT-like group with marketing and analytics skills,” Curtis says. This Marketing Infrastructure group is charged with making sense of Ancestry.com’s huge volume of customer data so that the marketing, analytics and IT teams can better leverage the data.
The team maintains the data infrastructure for the organization, including the initial and ongoing building and enhancement of the restructured databases, Curtis says.
“It really helped us bring everyone together,” he says.
When it comes to the data itself, Ancestry.com’s various team were having trouble accessing data in ways that made sense for their particular applications, and in a timely manner.
“We created a wiki knowledge base of data attributes that everyone can understand, we keep it very accessible and up-to-date everyone knows what data is available and what they can have,” Curtis says.
A quality assurance workflow process was also put in place to ensure that every time a team put a data project in motion, there is adequate time for QA.
“We have a workflow in place that controls that and enforces that it happens. Every request goes through the same process,” Curtis says.
Another difficult task for Ancestry was setting out a structure for the data architecture/IT relationship to ensure that all of the data the organization was using was coming from one source, as opposed to a variety of sources. The team worked with IT to figure out an official source of data, how it is collected and how it is stored.
“We have one location where this is stored together, where it’s easily accessible and where it’s in the right place,” Curtis says.
Addressing the team’s data challenges from an organizational standpoint as well as a data standpoint was one of the keys to success for Ancestry.com.
“You can spend a lot of time throwing money at these problems, but what we found was the best way to do this was to step back and get the right organization in place. Get the right people that can drive the success and the technology we select, make sure the right technology is there and the data is there,” Curtis says.
Once the Marketing Infrastructure group and the revamped data setup was in place, the team was able to readdress its approach to data segmentation projects, which were taking the organization hours to complete in some cases. By using persisted segmentation processes, or finding a target audience through data and capturing their information in a temporary table that excludes unnecessary information, the team saw significant time improvements in executions.
“We went from hours, in some cases, to minutes. We’re extremely flexible now—as long as we build the segmentation in a better way, we’re not bogging down the system,” Curtis says. Sounds like time well spent.
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