How Pets4Homes increased their RPM by almost 40% year on year
while improving user experience with holistic yield management?
Pets4Homes is the UK’s most popular pet-related website and boasts the largest free pet classifieds, with over 6 million visitors viewing 140 million pages monthly. Online since 2005, Pets4Homes connects buyers with responsible local breeders, animal shelters and pet charities. It is a part of the Pet Media Group.
Challenge
In 2019, when the Pets4Homes website was acquired by the Pet Media Group, the new owner quickly ascertained that the website’s monetization potential required a comprehensive strategy.
Both the technological facilities (ad stack development, adding new sources of demand) and the website’s UX (ensuring a balance between advertising revenues and user satisfaction) required urgent attention.
However, the new owners knew that they had certain resources that had already been assigned to other tasks that were equally strategic. Expanding the in-house team would be associated with a significant extension of the time needed to turn potential into profit.
A decision was made to outsource yield management.
Solution
A dedicated project team (Analyst, AdOps expert and Project Manager with the support of UX and Technical teams) got to work immediately and quickly generated a double-digit uplift.
The global crisis that began in March 2020 did not hinder the dynamic work. The implementation and optimization of the Header Bidding wrapper was combined with testing and selecting the most lucrative and high-quality SSP platforms. Yieldbird also strengthened the ad stack with additional advertising products, some of which individually generated around +20% incremental profit.
The scope of the Yield Management service also includes ongoing support in the field of Header Bidding settings (timeout management, bid adjustment, platform efficiency evaluation), UX recommendations, and consulting in the field of industry regulations (such as TCF 2.0). The Publisher also receives assistance in managing direct campaigns.
After the acquisition, our resources were focused primarily on the development of the business as a whole. We did not want to be distracted, so the support of an independent entity who would be able to quickly recognize the situation and offer us a comprehensive, but also specific strategy, was crucial for us.
Behind the Yieldbird team was many years of experience – the title of Google Certified Publishing Partner and numerous industry achievements; but what prevailed was the fact that in the first discussions we received interesting hints and recommendations that could immediately improve the status quo.
Axel Lagercrantz,
CEO @ Pet Media Group
Our main focus is trust and mutual understanding. We endeavoured to build cooperation based on quantitative and quality metrics that are fully understandable for the Client. We spent a fair amount of time making sure that we are on the same page when it comes to understanding the whole Programmatic ecosystem, with its correlations and fluctuations.
Pets4Homes Team is also especially proactive in looking for demand diversification. Every month, we implement new SSPs, products, or test some kind of Rich Media formats. This is not only beneficial for the Client, but also contributes to our internal development.
Julia Boczulińska,
Customer Performance Analyst @ Yieldbird
Demand Sources & Ad Products
RPM YoY
Hours saved by Client
I can definitely recommend cooperation with Yieldbird to all Publishers who care about high revenues,
but who do not necessarily want to invest time and resources to create or expand an in-house team.
For us, the possibility of delegating this work to a partner has been a great help – we have full control, but we don’t need to do everything ourselves. Besides, thanks to Yieldbird, we now know what the market is like and we are not closing ourselves in our own bubble.
– Axel Lagercrantz, CEO @ Pet Media Group
OUTSOURCED YIELD MANAGEMENT AS A LONG-TERM PROGRAMMATIC STRATEGY
In the Q4 of 2020, Pets4Homes and Yieldbird entered another level of cooperation – we created ad serving architecture dedicated for the new website of the Publisher. Besides optimization and the development of demand channels, Yieldbird will be responsible for bespoke adjustments to the setup which accord with the Publisher’s strategy.
– Bart Oprządek, Senior Customer Success Manager @ Yieldbird
Yield Management is a fully managed service in which Yieldbird takes care of and shoulders the responsibility for your Programmatic performance in order to give you more time to focus on your main priorities, such as content development and user acquisition. We can provide this service based on either your tools or ours: with Open Bidding, Header Bidding, with other products or without.
The decision is always yours, as you retain full control of the process.