Simplifying the search for do-it-yourself help

When homeowners in Australia need a job done around the house, they have an easy way to find professional help. Whether it’s a burst pipe, a landscaping project or a kitchen renovation, hipages helps people find and hire local tradespeople or “tradies”—without the usual hassle of asking for referrals or searching for contractors who are available to complete the project.

Homeowners simply post a description of the work they need done and hipages connects them with reliable tradies willing to take the job.

Search marketing is crucial for attracting consumers to the hipages website and its mobile app. Whenever homeowners search for solutions to their do-it-yourself challenges, it’s critical that hipages appear at the top of the search results.

Chris Hobbs, Senior Search Executive at hipages, explains: “Search is a key way that we connect with homeowners and tradies and it’s a critical part of our marketing strategy. To succeed, we need to get search marketing right.”

Services on the hipages site span 150 search categories. Each category requires a distinct marketing approach and a unique set of keywords. The company’s mostly manual approach to managing a wide variety of keywords was time-consuming for hipages’ four-person performance marketing team.

“Operating in as many trades as we do, we have quite a complex search marketing endeavour, which is why we needed a third-party bid management platform,” says Hobbs. “We needed to refine our list of keywords—identifying high performers and weeding out low performers—so we can get the most from our marketing spend.”

Aiming to automate the bidding process, the company opted to run a proof of concept (POC) with Adobe Advertising Cloud Search. hipages had tried other bid management tools in the past, but none produced such clear improvements in search metrics.

The marketing team saved 99 hours of manual work during the POC. The time savings increased to about 20 hours a week afterwards.

“Adobe Advertising Cloud Search helps us to save 1,000 hours annually of manual work managing and optimising search terms,” Hobbs says.

The successful POC convinced Hobbs and his team to move forward with a full implementation of Adobe Advertising Cloud Search, setting the foundation for a more strategic approach to search marketing.

Hiring an algorithm for the hard work of optimising bids

Managing a large volume of keywords manually was unsustainable for hipages, especially because the business needs to be able to pivot quickly. In the past, the marketing team worked with the company’s data science team to optimise bids. They downloaded the data in a spreadsheet, ran the analysis and uploaded the data back to Google Analytics—a process that was time-consuming and inefficient.

Now hipages optimises bids automatically with Adobe Advertising Cloud Search Performance Optimisation, powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.

“With Adobe Advertising Cloud Search, we define our top-line goals to push our search marketing in the right direction,” says Hobbs. “Then we simply push a button and let the algorithm make optimal bidding decisions for us. It saves a lot of time.”

Now the marketing team can manage the broad scope of keywords across multiple categories and domains with greater efficiency. Plus, bulk editing tools alleviate manual work associated with simple tasks such as updating creative content or modifying bids across multiple accounts.

According to Hobbs, “It used to take hours to make minor changes. Now, we can modify the creative across accounts in a matter of minutes using Adobe Advertising Cloud Search.”

“When you run the numbers on hours saved with an automated search tool, it was a no-brainer,” says Hobbs. “The time savings alone covers the cost of the tool—and that doesn’t include the performance uplift we get with Adobe Advertising Cloud Search.”

Less manual labour, more focus on business value

With less manual work, hipages can invest more into search marketing, ultimately improving growth and maximising ROI.

Automating manual tasks also allows the team to tackle one of hipages’ most pressing business challenges—balancing the volume of jobs with the availability of tradies.

“Being a marketplace, the balance between supply and demand is a key challenge,” explains Hobbs. “Adobe Advertising Cloud gives us a better handle on search marketing, so we can start to calibrate the flow of jobs with greater precision to match capacity.”

Adobe offers a support pillar for growth

For hipages, the relationship with Adobe played an important role in its decision to use Adobe Advertising Cloud. It makes sense for a company that strives to build trusted relationships between consumers and tradies—and it’s a strong foundation for continuing growth.

“We had previous experience using Adobe, so there’s a level of trust we wouldn’t necessarily have with another tool,” explains Hobbs. “The Adobe team has been there to support and guide us through the proof of concept and beyond—helping us to make the most of our search strategy with Adobe Advertising Cloud.”

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