Improving the Ads Performance as Interim Product Managers for AVIV

The Client: AVIV Group

Aviv Group is one of the world’s largest digital real estate tech companies, headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

The company operates a portfolio of digital real estate marketplaces and brands across Europe, providing a wide range of services to help connect buyers and sellers and make the process of buying, selling, and renting properties as easy as possible. The brands constituting Aviv Group’s family are 🇫🇷 Meilleurs Agents, 🇫🇷 Group Seloger, 🇧🇪 Immoweb, 🇧🇪 Immowelt, 🇪🇸 Housell, and 🇮🇱 Yad2.

In addition to its core operations, AVIV is also a leading investor in innovative real estate tech companies such as 🇬🇧 PurpleBricks, 🇩🇪 Homeday, 🇺🇸 Zumper, and 🇺🇸 Parcel.

The company’s ambition is to become the leading employer in prop-tech in Europe, shaping the industry's future through new business models by providing funding, resources, and expertise to these companies.

The Mission: Interim Advertising Product Manager

In 2022, Shaun Hicks, Product Director at Aviv approached Product People to hire a Product Manager that could build a cohesive advertisement strategy across different brands since each local team was building ad placements solely from a sales viewpoint - with no product or monetization strategy across placements, marketplaces, or countries. Even further, despite adding ad products, overall revenue seemed to be declining month on month.The objective of the mission was to quickly join in and:

• Assess the current advertising space on 3 core brands Immowelt (DE), Seloger (FR), and Immoweb (BE) focusing on:
• Coverage - What specific placements exist? What % of total page space is currently dedicated to advertising?
• Content - How well integrated are they into the overall design? How disruptive are they to the customer journey of a home seeker? What kind of content is filling that space?
• AdTech - What is the underlying tech that powers all of these ad placements? What is their performance (render time, visibility, etc.) and how does that compare across different markets?
• Build metrics that help understand the performance of these products and understand the underlying sales processes that support these products.
• Compare this internally across brands (where are the similarities & differences) and externally (what is the competition doing?).
• Make a recommendation for a unified approach that balances the trade-off of ad revenue and user experience while also maximizing the performance of these products.
• Explore the ability to white-label this solution (merge into 1 tech for all markets).

‍

Our Main Quest

Initiative 1- Data Consolidation and Analysis

Due to the fast growth of the company and the acquisition of multiple brands, the advertisement data was spread across different systems. Our first goal was to aggregate all the necessary data from global directories and build a cohesive analysis for each ad placement. Therefore, we consolidated, analyzed, and built trends on core metrics for each ad placement on the website (CTR, CPM, impressions, viewability, generated revenue) to determine problem statements and opportunity areas.

To enable organization-level tracking for ads performance and its consequent experiments, we used our analysis as a footprint to build a real-time, scalable data dashboard with the Business Intelligence and Data teams.

‍

Initiative 2 - Identifying and Delivering Quick Wins

Based on a detailed overview of the performance of the advertisements, we did an effort vs impact analysis and provided a list of short-term adjustments that could significantly increase the revenue for ads while building a more native user experience. We also followed a top-down approach to create alignment across the massive AVIV organisation by onboarding the Product Directors and VPs to the plan followed by product teams to incorporate it to their respective product roadmaps.

‍

Initiative 3 - Onboarding a New Product Manager

At the end of our mission, we handed over the delivery of ads quick wins and the white labeling strategy to a full-time Advertising Product Manager that Aviv had hired. We ensured a smooth onboarding process by helping the new employee to understand the scope of the mission, including the current status of the initiative and possible challenges they may face. We also swiftly included him in the daily tasks and work streams while supporting him in driving the white labeling framework across all Aviv Group brands and products.

‍

Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Built and validated a journey map of ad types and their placements across Aviv Group brands. Also provided a competitive analysis of ads as a benchmark for the existing ads portfolio

💡 Built a consolidated and cohesive database with all available data on the performance of the ads (CTR, CPM, impressions, viewability, generated revenue) for each sales channel and device type. Channeled it into an org-level dashboard to monitor ad performance in real time.

💡 Proposed short-term improvements that greatly impact revenue while keeping user experience at the heart of our plan. Also proposed a working framework to harmonize ad placements across brands.