AdBridg drives 60% revenue growth for major real estate publisher
AdBridg was approached by a leading global real estate publisher looking for help with revenue and operations strategy for their digital advertising business.
The challenge
Strategy struggles
Digging into the publisher’s challenges, it didn’t take long for AdBridg to find the root cause: the publisher was years behind in keeping their ad stack optimized and up to date.
Digging in deeper, the team found three primary reasons they were having so many problems:
Years of underinvesting in their ad stack left the publisher constantly struggling to do even the most basic tasks.
The publisher did not have a cohesive strategy and operational support to manage the multitude of revenue streams efficiently.
The SSP providing their header bidding solution stopped supporting their product.
Operations obstacles
The unique challenge of a real estate website is managing the delicate balance across three different revenue streams: direct ad sales, programmatic advertising and agent revenue. Meeting this challenge takes a well-designed strategy and execution plan.
AdBridg realized at the outset that this publisher hadn’t developed a thorough operational plan to meet their business goals efficiently. As a result, they were losing revenue, wasting needless hours and resources trying in vain to innovate, and continuing to make missteps along the way. Too many things were going wrong across the publisher’s ad stack.
Ad Stack Failures
AdBridg found the publisher’s ad stack challenges mostly stemmed from:
A code base that grew increasingly complex due to multiple engineers adding one-off, siloed patches, updates and new functionalities over time.
Too many unknowns about their own ad stack because of institutional knowledge gaps that had emerged after years of normal employee turnover.
Glacial progress on troubleshooting, support and improvements to the ad tech, due to scarcity of dedicated experts to maintain it and a tech team that was spread too thinly.
The solution
What this publisher really needed to address their problems was an expert ad tech resource they could work with as an adjunct to their team. A partner that offered deep knowledge of not only the technology, but also the operations and the business of digital advertising.
In AdBridg, the publisher found the resource they were looking for; a consultative relationship across multiple teams, who all came to rely on AdBridg for fast problem solving, advice, training and additional capacity to relieve the pressure on their overworked engineers.
Here are some of the more than 50 initiatives and optimization projects AdBridg undertook during the first year of working with the publisher:
Eliminated the “misinformed decision loop.”
Enabled the ad stack to generate more complete, accurate and useful information.
Fixed the inventory generation issues that had been causing inconsistent, impossible-to-understand statistics.
Made taxonomy improvements to address debugging issues, correct inaccurate delivery configurations and help illuminate the right questions to ask.
Produced custom research and historical reports tailored to their network, concerns, and internal audiences (e.g., execs, ad ops, engineering and product).
Helped with audience/segment generation, refinement and strategy.
Identified knowledge and operational gaps within their organization and advised on hiring to remove them.
Gave guidance on how to optimize overall business processes.
Trained their team on best practices and how the deep technical pieces of the ad stack work.
Helped determine how to package inventory to make it more valuable to PMP buyers.
Simplified the Order/Line Item/Creative setup.
Investigated causes of non-delivered ads and unfilled inventory and helped fix them.
Vetted and managed relationships with multiple technology vendors.
A/B tested Prebid stack and clarified cost of operation vs. revenue.
Employed staged releases and our standard QA process to minimize risk of releasing bugs.
Responded to requests to increase or decrease ad density based on demand and other business factors.
Used its industry-leading platform to implement strategies 10x faster.
Fixed bugs within hours, not days or weeks.
The outcomes
The most important outcome of the relationship between AdBridg and this publisher was to make more money for them. A lot more.
For example, within four months of launching an updated ad stack, AdBridg drastically increased revenue generation from the website. Additionally, after just one year the publisher recorded over 60 percent more programmatic revenue than they had earned in the year prior.
Another critical outcome: the publisher is now set up for better, easier and more reliable operations across all revenue streams. With a clearly defined operational strategy and more efficient internal resources, the publisher has been able to map out a far more profitable future for their entire business.
With AdBridg onboard, the publisher’s ad stack and operations are future-proofed for whatever goals or challenges will arise going forward in this swiftly evolving industry.