At Red Ventures, we use technology to improve the way brands and consumers interact online. But behind the scenes, we’re also building tech that constantly improves the way we work. Here are just a few of our favorite “tech lifesavers” we’ve built in-house that enable us to work faster and more efficiently than anyone else.
A better way to bid
We built an automated bid management platform that enables our paid search analysts to make better, machine-informed keyword bidding decisions every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In 2016, we automatically placed over one billion bids. One. Billion. Bids. If you’re a paid search analyst, you’re probably thinking that’s crazy, right?
Also that summer, our bidding platform engaged in a head-to-head test against an industry-leading bid management platform. Our product didn’t just do well. It took home the North Carolina Technology Award for Best Use of Analytics.
A smarter way to test
At RV, we’re all about testing. We design hundreds of different web experiences that feature unique combinations of creative and copy, then gather data on how each experience performs. This data helps us build the best possible websites for our partners. However, while this tactic is great in theory, it takes time to build hundreds of websites with similar – but different – experiences (and then track those experiences).
So, we built a website experience optimization platform to take care of the details. It allows our analysts to create user paths that organize data however they need it – in record time. This is just one of the many new tools that help us test more experiences, faster. Plus, it increases our analysts’ confidence in the hypotheses they’re creating.
Super-effective Admins and UI
We also built a totally-proprietary, super-intelligent messaging platform. (No, we’re never going to stop talking about it.) We use a blend of artificial intelligence, bots, and real, human agents to get high-intent customers where they want to go. In the last quarter alone, we performed half a million chats across more than a dozen businesses.
So far, we’ve only encountered one problem: “How do we make this thing even bigger?” Here’s the answer we’ve decided on: Empower our employees through (you guessed it) more tech.
Our team built a self-service tool that allows business teams to manage their own scripts (instead of relying on chat-dedicated engineers). The tool gives teams everything they need to create new scripts, tweak conversation flows, update logic and hold the world ransom for one million dollars. (Just kidding about that last one.) By bringing together our best copywriters, front-end developers, and analysts, we curate super-effective chat scripts.
Plus, the chat team is constantly iterating on new features, fixes, and overall improvements. In fact, our recent focus on mobile users allowed us to roll out a new mobile-focused UI that allows users to interact with a site in the background WHILE chatting. All in real time.
Up next: BIGGER DATA
If those tech life-savers weren’t enough to impress you, listen up. Our tech team is hard at work on our next product: an in-house tool to help our analysts better model, visualize, and report on data.
Data is a big part of what we do. And we’re always looking to streamline the process of accessing and aggregating it, in turn putting more power in our analysts’ hands. At the end of the day, this will help people – inside and outside of RV’s walls – make better decisions, faster, and more easily.
Do you like building cool tech that solves big problems? We’re hiring engineers right here, right now.
