How Smartie Pants built a premium data product with Astrato’s pixel-perfect embedded analytics

Smartie Pants: ad monetisation across 260 mobile games

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Smartie Pants operates at the intersection of mobile gaming and advertising technology. 

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The company helps game developers extract more revenue from in-app ads by optimising how those ads are served, priced, and measured. In an industry where fractions of a penny per impression compound into meaningful revenue at scale, the ability to analyse performance data quickly and present it clearly is not a luxury – it is the product.

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Founded nearly seven years ago, SmartiePants has grown into a data-driven operation managing over 260 games. The company’s value proposition rests on a simple promise: developers should focus on building games, while SmartiePants handles the complexity of ad monetisation.

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Looker visualised data, but dashboards weren’t presentable

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Before Astrato, Smartie Pants relied on Looker for client-facing reporting. The setup worked, but only barely. The dashboards looked unprofessional, white-labelling options were limited, and the overall presentation fell short of the standard the team wanted to set with its clients.

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“The design and the whole look and feel of Looker wasn’t professional. It wasn’t presentable. We decided that our data needed to look as good as the insights it contained.” –Ivo Stanchev, Product Lead

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The workflow compounded the problem. Rather than giving clients direct access to live analytics, the team took screenshots of dashboards and sent them via chat – a tedious, manual process that stripped away any interactivity. Clients could see a snapshot of their data, but they could not explore it, filter it, or interrogate it on their own terms.

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Meanwhile, internal decision-making relied on a patchwork of native platform analytics and spreadsheets. There was no single source of truth – just a collection of disconnected tools that made it difficult to see the full picture.

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“We used different dashboards for every client, which was very tedious and very time-consuming. And we were sending screenshots via chat. That was the whole workflow.” –Ivo Stanchev, Product Lead

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Why Smartie Pants chose Astrato

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For a company of Smartie Pants’ size, building a custom analytics layer was never a realistic option. The team had no dedicated BI engineers, and pulling product development resources away from the core platform would have stalled the roadmap. The question was not whether to buy – it was what to buy.

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When the time came to replace Looker, the evaluation was refreshingly quick. A new hire who had used Astrato at a previous company recommended it immediately. The requirements were specific: native connectivity to BigQuery and Snowflake with no data duplication, white-label embedding that could pass as SmartiePants’ own product, multi-tenant security so that each client’s data remained isolated, and a building experience accessible enough for non-technical users. Astrato met every criterion.

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“We brought in someone specifically to fix our reporting. He’d used Astrato before, and once he showed us what it could do — the native BigQuery connection, the white-labelling, how easy it was to build — there was nothing else to evaluate. From then on, it was only Astrato.” – Ivo Stanchev, Product Lead

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Staying on Looker was not a viable path. The platform served adequately as a data extraction layer, but it could not deliver the embedded, client-facing experience Smartie Pants needed. White-labelling was limited, the design was rigid, and building a separate customer-facing product on top of Looker would have required significant engineering effort – the very resource the team did not have.

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Premium data experience after adopting Astrato

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Astrato did not simply replace Looker. It changed how SmartiePants operates – and, ultimately, what the company is able to offer.

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One dashboard replaced a patchwork of tools

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The first shift was structural. All ad platform data – previously scattered across mediation platforms and spreadsheets – was centralised in BigQuery and surfaced through Astrato. 

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For the first time, the team had a unified view of performance across every client, every game, and every ad network. Internal decisions that once required toggling between multiple tools could now be made from a single, live dashboard.

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Clients got live analytics instead of screenshots

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The second shift was external. Clients went from receiving static screenshots to logging into their own dedicated dashboards, embedded directly into the SmartiePants experience. 

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One standardised, dynamic template now serves approximately 20 clients, each seeing only their own data through secure, role-based access. The dashboards are interactive, featuring more than ten filters and controls that let them explore their metrics in real time.

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“Clients now have their own accounts with role-based access. They can log in, see only their data, filter it, explore it. One template serves around twenty clients – each with a completely personalised view. It’s a different level of professionalism.” – Ivo Stanchev, Product Lead

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A brand new product, built on Astrato

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The most significant shift, however, was strategic. 

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Smartie Pants used Astrato as the analytics backbone of an entirely new product: a multi-mediation management platform that allows game developers to run multiple ad mediation services simultaneously and use AI-driven analysis to route inventory to whichever platform is delivering the best results. It is a capability that did not previously exist in the market.

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Astrato is the layer that makes the product’s value visible to clients. The platform surfaces comparison data across mediators – revenue per user, impressions, cost per thousand – so that each client can see exactly how the multi-mediation approach is performing against their single-platform baseline. 

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Without Astrato, SmartiePants would have the intelligence but no way to present it.

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“Astrato is the backbone of what we offer. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to show our clients what we’re capable of. It’s not merely our reporting tool, it’s how we demonstrate value.” –Ivo Stanchev, Product Lead

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A designer with zero BI experience built it all

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Perhaps the most telling proof of Astrato’s accessibility is the person who builds SmartiePants’ dashboards. Ivo Stanchev, the company’s Product Lead, came to the role with a background in design, not data. He had no prior experience with business intelligence tools. At a small company where people wear multiple hats, he found himself responsible for the team’s entire analytics layer.

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Within a year, Stanchev was building complex, interactive dashboards using Astrato’s Actions – a capability that allows users to create dynamic, event-driven interfaces. 

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His most ambitious project: condensing a 12-page report into a single interactive dashboard where users can show and hide different metrics and views with the press of a button.

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“I wasn’t interested in data, and I didn’t have much experience at all. But in a short time, I was building dynamic dashboards that I don’t think would have been possible on other platforms – at least not in the time I had. The ease of the whole building process is the best thing about Astrato.” –Ivo Stanchev, Product Lead

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Stanchev is quick to credit Astrato’s support team for helping him along the way. But the underlying point is hard to miss: a product leader with a design background and no BI experience was able to build enterprise-grade, client-facing analytics in a matter of months. For organisations evaluating embedded analytics platforms, that is a powerful data point in itself.

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“In less than a year, I went from having no experience with data to building the dashboards that power our entire client experience. Astrato gave us the ability to look professional and to prove what we can do.” – Ivo Stanchev, Product Lead

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