Just a quickie, but something I thought was worth bragging about ;-)
We use our dashboard every day, just like our clients do. This year we spent a big chunk of time making it really fast. Because the quicker you can get to your data, the more of it you actually use. So with that in mind, here's how it changed the queries behind the pages in the dashboard:
| Before | After | |
| Average query | 4.4s | 0.74s |
| Slowest 5% of queries | 18.2s | 2.25s |
| Back in under a second | 3% of queries | 75% of queries |
Those are the same queries, with the same data, measured across matched periods.
I think the reason as to 'why faster' is pretty obvious, but there is a story, so I'll tell it.
Before Ringside existed, we did our own reporting the way most people do, stitching together off-the-shelf dashboards, Excel sheets, duct tape, hope. Ignoring the fact they got plenty wrong and were a pain in the ass to manage, the thing that grated us the most was how slow they were. You just want a quick peek at something in a report and you're forced to watch a loading animation for 45 seconds. Yawwwn.
Jure (our co-founder and CTO) takes this kind of thing very personally. When we built Ringside to fix the sins of the past, speed wasn't just on our 'this would be nice' list, it was a starting condition. So Ringside has always been quick. But it's now up to eight times quicker. Zing!
Whilst the average query coming in under a second is the headline, what we did to the slow tail (IMO) is the best part. The real heaviest of questions - where you're crossing a channel against a campaign and really tugging away at them threads - used to take about eighteen seconds. And now? About two.
For some of us (👋🏼), eighteen seconds is long enough to lose our train of thought. It's long enough that we think "I'll come back to that after I check the BBC homepage". Then we don't. But at two seconds we just carry on and get to the fifth question instead of stopping at the first. And often, that's where the answer is hiding: why the number moved, rather than the fact that it did.
If waiting was quietly capping how far you were prepared to dig - it won't any more.
So if you've ever thought "is there a marketing data platform can keep up with how fast my brain is whirring", the answer is yes, and you should give us a shout.