How Redfin Increased Revenue Without Impacting User Experience

Redfin was built to get Home Buyers and Sellers a better deal. They pair local Redfin Agents with powerful technology to get buyers into the right home, earn sellers more, and save both sides thousands in fees.

Starting in 2020, Redfin partnered with Cordless Media as a way to increase ad revenue without making changes to their site. Without adding overhead and while in competition with Freestar (a top provider of Header Bidding technology), Cordless Media built out a custom ad technology stack in place of Redfin's existing setup.

The result was a head to head test where Freestar failed to even launch, a growth in revenue of over 300% for Redfin and zero discernible impact to user experience over a one year test.

Increase ad revenue without changing ad layout

Avoid increasing overhead and/or technical debt

Keep the platform safe from competitive ads

Maintain site quality and user experience

Maintain growth trajectory throughout trial

The Results

In the head-to-head test against Freestar, Cordless prevailed easily. Our teams ability to quickly adjust and customize our tech stack to meet the unique challenges presented by Refin's needs proved fatal to our competitor who was not even able to get their ads to render properly, much less demonstrate an increase in ad revenue.

By the end of our trial, WITHOUT changing a single ad location on page, our technology and industry specific demand increased revenues by 344%.

During the trial, ads were monitored by an in-house tool created specifically for Redfin, and user behavior was A/B tested between exact pages with and without ads. Over a 12 month period and over 1.3 billion ads only 363 ads were reported by users (mostly due to excessive retargeting or dislike for brands) and no difference was discovered between the control audience and the audience exposed to ads with regards to time on page, page views, site visits or various other engagement metrics.

Darren, Bodhi & team know the business forward and backward, and as a result are able to get creative in solving difficult or non-standard use cases quickly. When interviewing ad ops/yield partners, I was initially hesitant about going with Cordless because them being a smaller team felt like a risk. I was wrong; their size was an asset, as was their specialty in real estate sites.

Also: they smoked Freestar. I couldn't say on revenue, because they were barely able to get out the gate. But Freestar's solution slowed down the page, had security issues, and they even served an ad in a location that we did not authorize them to do.

We did some really rigorous testing on impact to users' behavior, including both causal impact modeling to estimate if we were reducing users' engagement with the site & allowing folks to report the ads if they found them inappropriate or invasive. We could find no measurable impact on users' site behavior, and the rate at which users reported an ad was astonishingly low (of 1.3 billion ads served, 363 instances total of negative feedback). There's still an open question of whether, over the long run, there's some brand erosion due to ads' presence, but we could find no evidence to support it in the tests we ran (though that's unrelated to Cordless specifically).

Max

Redfin