Customer

A Large Horizontal E-commerce Platform With USD15+ bn. In GMV

Our customer had built a small but growing advertising business on their platform, catering solely to their own sellers, and solving 2 problems:

For the sellers, placing advertisements in the form of banners or sponsored listings led to a demonstrable lift in sales on the platform.

For the platform itself, advertising could keep a premium set of sellers happy, while adding a revenue stream to their own business

Business Challenges

In building this business, our customer had encountered a number of challenges:

Complex Tech Stack

Adding advertising required our customer to add new components to their tech stack and make changes to their platform.

Cumbersome Workflows

Creating this business also created several new and complicated workflows, many of them run manually via email chains, excel sheets, or other offline documents.

Hard To Learn

Our customer experienced a steep learning curve in setting up this business, primarily because advertising was so different from their core e-commerce business.

As a consequence, our customer was held back from growing as fast as they wanted. 

New technology added complexity to their business, made worse because each component was disconnected from others. For example, their ad server did not talk to their booking system, or to their downstream revenue and invoicing systems. 

Additionally, because teams were disconnected from each other, even simple tasks like booking and flighting ad campaigns became painful. Sales teams double-booked limited inventory, resulting in revenue losses. 

Finally, with advertising being such a dynamic business, the business team was constantly looking for improvements, enhancements, experiments, or changes to their technology and ways of working. But with most of our customers’ engineers focused on their core platform, the ads business was often sidelined.

Goals

Growth

Grow the third party ads business with no day-to-day operational disruption.

Consolidation

Bring all ad monetisation workflows into a single end-to-end platform.

Interoperability

Make it easy and efficient for several connected teams to work together.

Insights

Elevate the levels of information and insights available to each team in real time.

Approach

We followed a thorough discovery-based process to plan, roll out, and constantly improve Voiro for our customer.

 We make sure we understand what each of your teams need, and how they work. This determines As-is and To-be scenarios, workflows, customisations, integrations, and phases.

Our largest customers benefit from a combination of consulting, services, and the final product configuration – spearheaded by a dedicated Delivery team.

Phased Implementation

Out-of-the-box Rollout

Product rollout with minimal customisations and ready integrations to streamline the sales and revenue processes and information.

Deeper Functionality

Customer success and Engagement team deployed to help in rollout and continuous support.

Subsequent Phases

Deeper integrations with custom ad server and other systems.

Customer Outcomes

Efficiency

We simplified their workflows, bringing down their campaign setup time by 95%, to under 15 minutes. Our ticketing engine made sure that their teams could collaborate smoothly with each other, without the need of long email threads or missed information. And our reporting suite brought down hours of manual data gathering and analysis down to zero.

Visibility

The moment all our customers’ workflows were on Voiro, all their data was as well. By integrating with their ad servers, we could give them real-time accurate data on campaign delivery, performance and revenue at risk. And our revenue reconciliation engine ensured that all of that delivery data could be translated into revenue figures that were real-time, correct, and consistent across their organisation. 

Cost Savings

Time spent equals cost. And Voiro was able to speed up the order-to-cash process significantly via automation and better collaboration. Additionally, real-time accurate revenue meant that our customer’s monthly reconciliation and invoicing cycle time dropped by over 80%, bringing them sizable working capital savings.

Flexibility

 Voiro integrates with several different ad servers, programmatic partners, and upstream systems, aggregating data from all these sources and making them useful in a single interface. As a result, our customer benefited from tremendous flexibility, being able to change their workflows, technologies, and even their ad servers at will. With no impact on the business. 

Ease Of Work

Via our API integrations, Voiro was easily able to fit into our customer’s intricate network of systems, many of them custom-built. We enabled our customer to transform their revenue practices, without any large-scale disruptions to their existing ways of working. 

In summary, as a consequence of the benefits that we’ve described above, our customer has been able to effectively scale. Their teams are data-driven and higher performing. They are able to run events with 500-1000% spikes in ad volumes without worrying about workflow overloads. And they have achieved this without massive investments in time or resources. The end result: ever since they started using Voiro about 2 years ago, this customer has grown their ads business 4X.

Are you an e-commerce platform thinking of leveraging advertising?

Do you have an ads business that you’re looking to scale up?

Do you identify with any of the challenges we’ve discussed here?