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a16z top 100 marketplace #40, 2021See how top marketplaces have increased conversions by +11% and continued to improve revenue by integrating with Promoted.
www.hipcamp.com
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Interview with Jon Eckstein, Engineering Lead
LI (jon@hipcamp.com),
and Mike Kolarik, Staff Product Manager
LI (mike.kolarik@hipcamp.com)
Promoted increased Hipcamp’s conversions by 11% by better matching guests with hosts in Hipcamp search.
CONVERSIONS
+11%
Hipcamp is a growing community of good-natured people and the most comprehensive resource for unique outdoor stays.
By connecting people with the land and each other, Hipcamp works to support those who care for the land and get more people out under the stars.
Hipcamp has the backing of world class partners including A16Z, Benchmark, August Capital, and O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, most recently in a Series C.
Hipcamp wanted to increase user booking rate, a proxy of revenue and both guest and host satisfaction, by improving the quality of its marketplace search results.
With a mature engineering team already following best practices in search and discovery optimization, Hipcamp already had optimized its results to an industry-standard search quality score.
No more obvious low-hanging fruit remained and additional best-practices work failed to move metrics forward. In addition, Hipcamp had product constraints around distance, boosting, and blending, and required support for its in-house marketplace managers to manipulate listings. They needed a unified and adaptive solution to serve many stakeholders.
Promoted maximized conversions. (+11%)
They did this by applying the state-of-the-art in conversion optimization ads engineering to the problem of marketplace search results. We created a unified organic and promotion system for Hipcamp in three steps:
Hipcamp installed the Promoted client and server SDKs to collect more, higher quality metrics like insertions, impressions, and clicks. Then, they merged existing third-party event systems like Segment to add conversions. Promoted’s Metrics system automatically joined and aggregated these event streams in real-time for use in optimization and reporting.
Hipcamp sent its search results to Promoted's Delivery system for optimized re-ranking and blending. Promoted and Hipcamp ran A/B user studies to measure progress and total impact.
Metrics and Delivery create a feedback loop to continue to optimize and improve results over time. Through this framework, Promoted can support new allocation rules, product logic, and data. Hipcamp has the flexibility to add new listing types, cross-promotions, and internal promotions to its feed and search at any time, and Promoted's optimization will continue to work automatically.
The Promoted Delivery API optimizes listings in search, feed, or paid promotions.
Call our Delivery API where you would call a database or a search service like Elastic. We re-rank on every request to deliver the best possible listings, personalized to each user and context in real-time.
To get your marketplace optimized faster, use shadow traffic to safely train and test our Delivery systems so you can be confident before live production.
Visit our Server Libraries page to learn more.
References and testimonials
“The team at Promoted has been fantastic to work with [on] marketplace results [and] data quality issues.
[…] Search historically has been an area that we have tried [repeatedly] to optimize, with some results, but not any step change. [Working with Promoted], we were really able to get that step change. Being a part of that team has [brought me] exposure to the types of problems that other marketplaces are solving with this kind of technology. [I can] say, ‘I’m part of the team that is moving our conversion metrics,’ and that has been great for my [internal] visibility as well.”
“There are usually trade offs between performance, speed to market, and cost.
[W]e were able to improve the experience for our customers faster, more effectively, and more economically using Promoted. It was an easy decision that continues to pay off.
“The team at Promoted has been fantastic to work with [on] marketplace results [and] data quality issues.
[…] Search historically has been an area that we have tried [repeatedly] to optimize, with some results, but not any step change. [Working with Promoted], we were really able to get that step change. Being a part of that team has [brought me] exposure to the types of problems that other marketplaces are solving with this kind of technology. [I can] say, ‘I’m part of the team that is moving our conversion metrics,’ and that has been great for my [internal] visibility as well.”
“There are usually trade offs between performance, speed to market, and cost.
[W]e were able to improve the experience for our customers faster, more effectively, and more economically using Promoted. It was an easy decision that continues to pay off.
Our Client Metrics Libraries integrated with Hipcamp's web and mobile apps to deliver the real-time data that powers Promoted Delivery.
When integrating web or mobile frontends with Promoted, you can use our state-of-the-art client libraries to get up and running quickly and correctly. Take the guesswork out of your analytics. Our libraries are tailored specifically for Promoted Delivery.
Visit our Client Metrics Libraries page to learn more.
