Case Study: Canva achieves personalized, targeted messaging for 55M+ users with Census

How Canva uses reverse ETL to personalize messages to 55M+ users

Canva, the visual communications platform with more than 55 million monthly active users, needed to scale personalization and segmentation but lacked a reliable way to push rich user data from its Snowflake warehouse into marketing tools like Braze and ad platforms. After weighing build vs. buy, Canva adopted Census’ reverse ETL to bridge the warehouse to destinations such as Braze, Salesforce, Facebook Ads and Google Ads so analysts could activate warehouse-derived segments without fragile in‑product tags or bespoke scripts.

Using Census to sync SQL segments and ML propensity scores into marketing and advertising destinations, Canva made segmentation self‑service and experiment-driven: personalized messaging now reaches 55M+ users, data analysts can put complex or ML-based segments into production in minutes rather than weeks or months, and data engineers no longer spend weeks building and maintaining integrations. Census’ incremental syncs, observability and centralized governance also lowered API volume/costs, enabled faster growth experiments and streamlined retargeting and Salesforce workflows.

Canva

Cuong Duong

Data Analyst