Case Study: BuzzFeed migrates from Looker to Omni in under three months
Key results
The challenge
After nearly a decade on Looker, BuzzFeed felt weighed down by a lack of product innovation, rigid workflows, and declining customer support, including a six-month stretch with no clear way to submit support requests. Technical barriers forced many users into Google Sheets or Looker Studio, creating untraceable satellite reports that were difficult to maintain. The company was also migrating to dbt and needed a BI tool with deep integration.
The solution
BuzzFeed evaluated legacy BI vendors and newer entrants against criteria including ease of use, use-case consolidation, a semantic model alongside dbt, GitHub and dbt integrations, and dedicated support, then selected Omni. The team found the initial Omni data model fast to build, syncing instantly with the warehouse, and used the migration to align with stakeholders and prioritize content.
“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.”
LBLizzy BradfordSenior Director of Analytics, BuzzFeed
The results, in context
BuzzFeed migrated its eight-year-old Looker estate in less than three months, launching Omni company-wide and reducing time spent on certain ad-hoc requests by up to 80%. The Product team can now monitor key metrics and user journeys with alerts, while the Editorial team increased self-service using period-over-period analyses and dynamic filters, reducing reliance on the Analytics team.