Outschool’s mission is to inspire kids to love learning. They believe the best way to do that is by linking learning to interests and giving kids the autonomy to pick their own path. To do that, Outschool wanted to better match learners with educators to increase search conversion rates, total GMV, and profitability. Existing recent investments in search quality were promising, and Outschool wanted to extend these investments to further increase conversion rates.

These investments using had already brought Outschool search conversion optimization to the state-of-the-art in terms of systems and practices. Any further improvement would need to be an order-of-magnitude investment in a combination of user metrics collection, data processing, modeling, and real-time serving.

Outschool primarily compared Promoted to building search and discovery improvements in-house. Outschool chose Promoted because they weighed the cost and risk of the aforementioned infrastructure investment against partnering with the highly experienced and recommended Promoted team to get a working, managed solution that they would benefit from immediately.

Structurally, Outschool is a complex two-sided peer-marketplace with time-sensitive, unique, and variable inventory. Its web app combines Segment for measuring user engagement with in-house search retrieval solutions using Elasticsearch and OpenSearch.