Case study: beRecruited
beRecruited
beRecruited is the number one online networking destination in the US for high school student athletes seeking recruitment by college coaches and universities. To date, beRecruited has more than 200,000 registered student athletes, 10,000 college coaches, and 5,000 high school and club coaches. In March this year, in an effort to optimise their advertising revenue, primarily through rich targeting options, the company switched from their own ‘home-grown’ ad serving solution to OpenX.
Why OpenX?
The company went through an acquisition in October 2007 and at that stage hired an ad salesperson and developed several new advertising partnerships. “We really needed better targeting capabilities, scheduling features and the ability to estimate inventories for the following month,” explains beRecruited’s Marketing Manager, Russell Cook. “We felt that if there was a quality platform like OpenX out there that already did this, and that was their specialism, then why would we build it ourselves?”
Deploying the software
“We basically ripped out our own product and since the initial deployment of OpenX we haven’t had to put any development resources into supporting the home-grown ad server, so it has definitely saved us time,” says Russell.
Increased revenue
Russell believes that OpenX has “without a doubt” improved beRecruited’s ad serving capability and “absolutely” increased their ad revenue. “We didn’t used to have any kind of targeting capability. Another feature that we didn’t have before - and has now proved very useful - is being able to set up an ad campaign ahead of time and determine the start date, the end date, and the estimated number of impressions.
“When it comes to the big name advertisers like Nike and Reebok, being able to schedule and do frequency capping are often requirements for submitting an RFP,” explains Russell, “so having flexible capabilities enables us to secure new campaigns.
“Recently one of our advertisers had a very strange frequency requirement - they only wanted to show one ad per unique user per day. So again, in that circumstance OpenX was definitely very, very helpful. The CPMs for that campaign were $30. I don’t think a lot of systems would let you do something that off the wall.
“We’re extremely happy with OpenX,” concludes Russell, “it has really helped us manage our inventory effectively and enabled us to do a lot for our advertising partners.”