How Insider One uses ClickHouse Cloud to power real-time customer engagement at scale

Summary

Insider One’s Unified Customer Database (UCD) unifies event data, user attributes, identity resolution, and profiles across channels to support real-time segmentation, personalization, and analytics. The platform initially ran ClickHouse in a self-managed AWS deployment, but growth brought larger datasets, more concurrent queries, and increasing work tuning clusters and balancing performance against cost. In a proof of concept, the team migrated an anonymized dataset from one of its largest customers to ClickHouse Cloud and replayed UI segmentation, audience-count, and scheduled-campaign workloads. Average query latency fell 50–60% without significant changes, reaching 70–75% for the largest customers, while latency percentiles became more predictable; the managed service also reduced operational burden and gave the team more capacity for product development and its AI-oriented roadmap.

Takeaways

1. 1

   A ClickHouse Cloud proof of concept reduced average query latency by 50–60% without significant changes to Insider One’s workloads, with improvements reaching 70–75% for its largest customers.

2. 2

   The validation measured P50, P75, P90, and P99 latency because long-tail delays affect segment building and campaign launches; ClickHouse Cloud reduced those outliers and made performance more predictable.

3. 3

   Moving cluster management to ClickHouse Cloud reduced operational effort, allowing Insider One to focus more on building features on its Unified Customer Database and supporting an AI-driven roadmap.