Updated August 2026
A visual case study…
Gumtree & eBay: A Visual BI Strategy
In mid-2017, Gumtree Australia — part of the eBay Group — wanted a strategy connecting its deep data to decisions. Over an eight-week engagement, Datalabs audited the analytics landscape across four lenses and delivered a visual BI strategy: a multi-year roadmap, governance frameworks, and a capability pathway.
The engagement in one paragraph
What did the Datalabs Agency deliver for Gumtree?
From 2 May to 30 June 2017, the Datalabs Agency ran an independent visual business intelligence strategy engagement for Gumtree Australia: a discovery audit across the existing Google Analytics and eBay data warehouse landscape, then a strategy package — a multi-year roadmap, governance frameworks and best-practice standards, implementation guidelines, and training recommendations — presented to the Director of Analytics and leadership.
The Datalabs Agency is a Melbourne-based data visualization consultancy founded in 2012 that delivers corporate training workshops (Power BI, Tableau, data storytelling), dashboard design, and BI style guides for clients including Mercedes-Benz, Adidas, and UPS.
Watch the audit become a strategy
Four lenses in, four outputs out
Eight weeks between them: an audit across four lenses on the left, and the strategy package it produced on the right.
The problem behind the brief
Why did a data-rich business need a BI strategy?
The animation above is the engagement’s shape. The problem behind it: Gumtree had no shortage of data — Google Analytics and the eBay data warehouse gave deep visibility into behaviour, audience, revenue, and user actions. The brief the Director of Analytics set out named the gaps to close: a coherent approach to visual analytics, data reaching decision-makers in usable form, and a defensible basis for choosing BI tools.
The Director of Analytics wanted something specific: an independent expert assessment — someone outside the organisation, with nothing to sell, who could evaluate the landscape objectively and produce a roadmap the business could act on. That independence shaped the whole engagement: pure strategy, no build, and recommendations judged on fit-for-purpose criteria rather than a vendor relationship.
What an audit inspects
The four audit lenses
Each lens asked a different question of the same analytics landscape.
| Lens | What was assessed |
|---|---|
| Technical analysis | The existing data infrastructure across Google Analytics consoles and eBay data warehouse systems |
| Business analysis | Stakeholder needs, current reporting capability, and how decisions were actually being made |
| Data analysis | Data quality, accessibility, and integration points across platforms |
| Tool evaluation | The BI tool landscape, assessed against fit-for-purpose criteria |
Delivered primarily remotely from Melbourne.
The working documents, full size
From the strategy sessions
Click any panel to view it full-screen — the working-session materials, plus the relational map we drew as a Datalabs planning artifact to see the whole dashboard suite on one page.
The first working session agenda
Session One
The second working session agenda
Session Two
Our relational map of the proposed advertising dashboard suite — a Datalabs planning artifact
The relational map
Why this engagement is different
The shape of an independent strategy
Six things that defined the engagement — and define every strategy audit we run.
Delivered and presented
What did Gumtree receive at the end?
A comprehensive strategy audit report, the visual BI strategy presentation with a multi-year roadmap, technical architecture recommendations, and implementation guidelines with next steps — translated into accessible visual form and presented to the Director of Analytics and leadership team.
The strategy was written to be enabling rather than binding: tool selection criteria instead of a vendor pick made for them, governance frameworks the team could grow into, and a capability pathway so the roadmap had owners inside the business. An independent assessment earns its fee by leaving the client able to decide, and equipped to execute.
An independent audit is worth commissioning precisely because the auditor has nothing to sell.
Otto Ottinger
The principle behind the engagement
Questions & Answers
The Gumtree engagement
Four questions, one landscape
What a visual BI audit actually inspects
An analytics audit fails when it only looks at technology. Gumtree’s landscape got four separate examinations, because the four ways a BI capability breaks are different. The technical lens walked the infrastructure — Google Analytics consoles, the eBay data warehouse, and the joins between them.
The business lens asked the awkward question: how are decisions actually made here, and what reporting do they really run on? The gap between official dashboards and the spreadsheets people trust is where most strategies are won. The data lens then tested quality, accessibility, and integration — whether the raw material could support the ambitions.
The tool evaluation came last, on purpose. Assessing the BI market against fit-for-purpose criteria only makes sense once you know the infrastructure, the decisions, and the data health the tool must serve. Choosing the platform first and discovering the requirements afterwards is the standard failure mode of BI procurement.
Those four lenses became the audit report, and the report became the strategy. It is the same sequence behind our dashboard design services engagements today — understand before recommending, recommend before building.
Inside the security perimeter…
Consulting to enterprise security standards
Working for an eBay Group company means working inside an eBay-grade perimeter. The engagement ran under a formal Data Protection Requirements Addendum and ISO 27001-aligned controls, with secure remote access from Melbourne into eBay consoles and databases — every session governed, every access accountable.
That framework is a constraint, and it is also a credential. A consultancy that can operate under a global technology company’s security regime — full service agreements, governed data access, remote delivery — has demonstrated something no case study paragraph can: that it can be trusted inside the walls.
The remote model mattered too. In 2017, delivering an enterprise strategy engagement primarily from Melbourne into an Australian subsidiary of a US giant was still unusual; it has since become our default shape for interstate and international work. Secure access plus disciplined working sessions beat airfares — then and now.
And the deliverable respected the trust: strategy the client owns outright, with training and capability recommendations so the skills to execute it could be built in-house. When the engagement ended, the client held everything needed to execute.
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