Performance marketing agency uses Ringba’s real-time bidding ping tree to expand their business into new channels.
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Objective
Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Rank Media Agency is a digital and performance marketing company with a rich history of executing successful omni-channel campaigns. From their humble beginnings as a traditional agency, they quickly leveraged their marketing expertise into a powerful performance-based consumer acquisition engine for their customers.
“Acquiring high quality new customers for our clients is one of our most important initiatives.” says Yohan Perez, CEO and Founder of Rank Media. Many of Rank’s clients are some of the most recognizable brands in the world, including: The Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, Montblanc, Sotheby’s Realty, and Velapoint Insurance.
Rank Media has long been aware of the benefits of working with call tracking technology for their marketing campaigns. Utilizing this technology helps them better understand the customer’s journey and equips Rank’s team with critical insights into what channels are producing the best results for their clients.
Challenge
By early 2019 Rank’s team concluded that their current technology provider had become a hurdle rather than a resource; with obsolete technology no longer providing a competitive advantage. Being thought leaders in the space they knew they needed a solution that was cutting edge, and one in which Rank could grow with.
“I had zero interest in switching. Literally zero. But once I got to know Ringba, their team, their values, and their technology, I quickly realized there was only one path to the future success of our business” said Neil Rubin, Managing Partner of Rank Media’s insurance division.
“Comparing Ringba’s level of innovation to any of their competitors is like comparing Tesla vs Ford. Ringba’s innovations are changing how entire industries operate and working with them allows us to cultivate the ideas that will invent the future of our business” said Rubin. “In retrospect, I was surprised how easy it was to switch. They supported us the entire way.”
Solution
Rank’s first task during their migration was to improve the media buying team’s optimization capabilities. They placed Ringba’s JavaScript across all of their landing pages and funnels, allowing Ringba to capture UTM parameters, keywords, and other data required to properly track the customer journey.
With Ringba, Rank now has access to a large amount of caller meta-data including browser, device type, internet service provider, wireless carrier, city, state, zip code, and more. With this meta-data, Rank makes intelligent real-time routing decisions while also optimizing their media buying efforts.
“The heart and soul of every marketing team is their access to data,” said Jonathan Berthold, Vice President of Strategy. “The amount of optimization I’ve been able to do with Ringba is unparalleled compared to what I had before.” By leveraging Ringba’s technology specifically designed for professional marketers, Rank achieves a significantly higher return on investment for every marketing dollar they spend.
Driving Up the Value of Calls with Real Time Bidding
“Our goal is always to be on the cutting edge of technology and business processes,” says CEO Perez. “Ringba’s industry leading Real Time Bidding technology allows us to instantly integrate with some of the world’s largest call buyers and have them compete for our traffic in a programmatic setting. This is something that wasn’t possible for us before Ringba, and it opens up an entirely new playing field.”
Rank worked hand in hand with Ringba’s team of dedicated support engineers to create call flows that combine real-time programmatic bidding, along with their traditional static buyers, to truly maximize the value of every caller. “I love that we can visualize how campaigns flow, it’s really cool,” said Rubin. “Real-time activity, concurrency. I love the ability to dig into the call details and see what actually happened on the calls. Ringba gives us transparency into our call flow that we’ve never had before.”
Furthermore, Rank leverages Ringba’s Instant Caller Profile technology to automatically append hundreds of data points to every caller in real-time. This allows them to seamlessly pass caller demographic data directly to buyers so they can make more intelligent bids while also significantly driving up conversion rates by alleviating the need for a zip code collection IVR prompt on more than 85% of their phone calls.
Should one of their buyers not answer the phone, be busy, or have any type of telecom issues, Ringba re-routes their phone call in real-time to another buyer, creating an enhanced customer experience while also reducing as much waste as possible. This is something Rank’s previous call tracking platform is not capable of doing and their solution was to simply hang up the phone, causing confusion, a poor caller experience, and losses for their clients. “The ability to control the customer experience by re-routing a call that isn’t answered, combined with real time bidding changed the entire game for us,” said Rubin.
Results
Ringba Creates a Substantial Increase in Operational Efficiency
Brian Appel, Rank Media’s Director of Operations and Business Development, has been responsible for implementing Ringba into Rank’s day to day workflow. “I didn’t realize how ridiculous the process was on our previous platform from start to finish of creating a campaign, target, and assigning a publisher until I did it on Ringba. I went back and was like… what is this tangled web of madness?!” said Appel. “To set up a new campaign and assign it to a pub, set up payouts, etc, I’d say it’s at least 80% faster. It’s crazy how much faster setup is. Literally one vs seven minutes.”
Ringba’s world-class engineering team spends a great deal of time optimizing the platform’s user experience to speed up tasks for our clients. Appel and his team communicate directly with Ringba’s support engineers to streamline Rank’s workflows and improve the overall product for all of our clients.
“I’ve worked with other service providers for more than five years,” said Appel, “Ringba provides us the best support I’ve ever experienced. Feature requests are taken to heart and implemented when necessary. I love seeing the platform constantly being updated, especially when they are my requests! Between better technology, referrals, our strong working relationship, the team’s knowledge base, and time spent working with us to make improvements, we have definitely made more money.”
Ringba Helps Rank Increase Net Margins
Through the use of Ringba’s real-time bidding capabilities, combined with automated routing and Ringba’s usage-based pricing, Rank was able to improve their return on investment in all of their marketing channels. “Our net profits are much higher,” said Rubin, “using Ringba is a no brainer.”
Ringba’s pricing model is simple and designed with the customer’s goals in mind. With no contracts, setup fees, support fees, integration fees, bundled minutes, or minimums, Rank was able to lower their overall invoice by over 40% by switching to Ringba. Rank’s previous provider inhibited their growth with overages that were significantly more expensive than their normal rate, and they also struggled to deal with the seasonality of health insurance campaigns by having a forced minimum amount of usage. Ringba has changed all of that and now Rank’s billing model scales up and down as their business needs evolve.
Future
Leveraging the industry’s most sophisticated call selling technology, Rank plans to move into new verticals and significantly scale their call business. They are excited for all the new opportunities that using Ringba creates, and Rank’s own business model is helping drive these changes. This is a core principle of Ringba: our roadmap is dictated by our clients’ needs.
The entire Rank team said they would recommend Ringba to anyone that uses phone calls as part of their consumer acquisition strategy. “Ringba provides an unnatural level of support. You not only don’t expect that level of support, it is literally perfect, 10 out of 10. If you’re not working with Ringba today, we highly recommend reaching out.”
