Sportsvite increases revenue by 90% with PubMatic
Summary: Sportsvite (www.sportsvite.com) is an online community that connects people who play sports and helps them organize their games among friends, in leagues, or for pick-up.
Sportsvite uses PubMatic for both its ad network and ad layout optimization capabilities. Sportsvite has seen a 90% increase in revenue with the use of PubMatic's service, while at the same time reducing time spent on managing its ad inventory.
Business: Sportsvite is an online community dedicated to helping people discover, organize, and participate in recreational sports activities. Sportsvite was started for everyone who loves sports, but finds it frustrating to actually organize games or find people who want to play them. With Sportsvite, recreational athletes can organize their games and leagues or find people nearby with a passion for sports. Sportsvite receives over 250,000 unique visitors per month and sells over 7.5 million ad impressions per month.
"PubMatic automates and optimizes all aspects of decision making for how we sell our ad inventory. We no longer have to monitor multiple ad networks and rely on A/B or other testing frameworks."
- Vin Bhat, Co-Founder of SportsviteChallenge: As Sportsvite analyzed its revenue from the sale of ads through ad networks, Sportsvite co-founder Vin Bhat found that his eCPMs varied significantly from one day to the next. "There is a pretty high variance in eCPM among the various ad networks. The problem is, one day one ad network is paying the most and the next day it's a different ad network," said Mr. Bhat.
Moreover, Mr. Bhat was overwhelmed with the complexity of testing various combinations of text ads to determine which ones would perform best. With literally billions of different text ads to choose from with Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, it was virtually impossible for Mr. Bhat to determine the optimal ad layout. "We were in a continuous, time consuming cycle of creating our own A/B testing frameworks, tracking the data, analyzing it, and then updating our tags. There was no end in sight."PubMatic Solution and Results: Sportsvite turned to PubMatic for two key features of the PubMatic solution - optimizing ad inventory across leading ad networks and optimizing the layout of text ads. PubMatic generated a 90% increase in revenue within a few days.
PubMatic optimizes ad inventory across ad networks on the publisher's behalf, working with the largest ad networks in operation today including many of the world's largest ad networks and more ad networks available on a monthly basis. PubMatic updates ad network prices automatically throughout the day, so that the publisher doesn't have to, and sends each impression to the ad network that can best monetize it.
In addition to ad network optimization, PubMatic optimizes the layout of text ads, determining the color scheme that maximizes click-through rates. PubMatic uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze various factors such as web page characteristics, user characteristics, and other information to identify the optimal color scheme for an ad in real time. An ad with the specified color scheme is then requested from the appropriate ad network on the publisher's behalf.
Sportsvite realized an increase in revenue within a few days. The combination of ad network optimization and ad layout optimization led to a 90% increase in revenue. "PubMatic automates and optimizes all aspects of decision making for how we sell our ad inventory. We no longer have to monitor multiple ad networks and rely on A/B or other testing frameworks," said Mr. Bhat. "We also took advantage of another key benefit of PubMatic - it consolidates reporting across all of my ad networks for me. I don't need two guys and a spreadsheet just to figure out my revenue today."About PubMatic: PubMatic is the world's first service that automates and optimizes ad serving decisions for publishers. Over 1500 publishers use PubMatic to significantly increase their ad sales revenue by optimizing their ad inventory across the world's largest online ad networks and using sophisticated algorithms to optimize the layout of text ads. Find out more at www.pubmatic.com.
