local media insider
Review

RealMatch one more way to beef up online classified sales

Media upsell incremental revenues into the network

Alisa Cromer
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Rebuilding - or just starting to build - a classifieds franchise?

Pay close attention to simplified online order-taking, aggregated solutions and social media.  Ad networks that specialize in recruitment are a fertile area to increase order size and provide better candidates.

One such opportunity, RealMatch, offers a white-label ad network - also branded as The Job Network -  for recruitment ads with one-click order-taking for more than 1000 job marketplaces, including local, national, niche and social.

"More people are looking for a job than there are people who know your job board. People don't look for a job board, they look for a job." ," says Brendan Shea, Director of Channel Development.

The idea is good, but how is the execution? RealMatch's  core competencies are three-fold:

First, the order-taking system provides automated one-click distribution of search-optmized employment ads across the The Job Network, hence more applicants.

Second,  proprietary job-matching technology parses job seekers' experience, skills, preferences and resumes to match them with the advertisers' posts. 

RealMatch contends that their matching algorithm produces a better match than a simple key word search, hence better applicants.

The result should be a more efficient buy, with improved ad performance and higher quality candidates - especially in sectors where employees are more difficult to find, such as healthcare.

Finally, media who become a member of the network receive a boost in traffic and a small uptick in passive orders.

Publishers who use a different job board, such as Monster, can  still upsell RealMatch's network,  or decide use the white label version for all order-taking and job board management. This means publishers inventory will also be in the network so that advertisers can  passive candidates matches from the resume database and from LinkedIn (explained below).

Brendan Shea, Director of Channel Development at RealMatch, estimates that passive ads can account for an uptick of up to 5%, and that upselling on the platform delivers 5x the response of Monster, especially for hard to fill jobs.

Shea also claims that the typical recruitment franchise typically sees a 52% boost in traffic a 30% boost in candidates that apply, and a 50% sell through rate. We were unable to confirm these numbers, however, a newspaper site that uses the full order-taking platform for several years says roughly 25% of ad sales  include upsells into the network,  and that they were able to raise the gross value of a typical ad from about $100 to about $179.

While individual users can post ads on RealMatch, 80% of its business now comes from local media and trade publishing companies, such as UT San Diego, HR.com, Ars Technica and CFO Magazine.

RealMatch discloses the list of job boards in the network to publishers, except for a few  boards that are worried about cannibalization. Missing from the network are the large networks like Monster and Career Builder, and some specialty networks like AfterCollege. But while not a  truly universal solution, there is enough of a lift to provide a better buy.

Brendan Shea, Director of Channel Development, claims the platform automatically monitors and optimizes ads, so that if an advertisement falls from page one to page two of Google, it is optimized again.

One interesting feature is integration with LinkedIn. For example, when an ad is posted on a publisher site powered by RealMatch, the poster can enter the admin side and click to see all the candidates that have applied... then click on a link to LinkedIn, to pull matching candidates from the user's own first, second, or third degree connections (the level of connections depends on the user's own permissions).

The poster must still contact these applicants via LinkedIn's in-mail or see where they are working and call. And, of course, they can only search their own contact list, but this feature still provides a more proactive recruitment ability.

A email marketing tool also helps re-engage candidates.

The actual sell-through rate depends in part on the commitment of the organization. The Washington Post which sells TweetMyJobs only - part of the RealMatch network - claims an 35% of merchants opt-in and receive a 30%  lift in candidates from adding the social media network. A case study on AfterCollege showed an 80% sell through from one of its partners.

The business model is based on a posting fee when an ad is sold into the network,  rather than a licence fee. The posting fees vary according to volume and click source, and there is also a performance based model for very large posters. The publisher marks up it's own packages.

The media's can use it's own merchant account with RealMatch's e-commerce platform, with the settlement also processed via their billing system.

Our take: It's not easy to assess a new an complex platform. Here are a few considerations:

• How will this platform integrate with other classifieds offerings and is it more or less important to have a better product than to have an integrated system. Many companies are moving towards better, though less integrated, franchises. Some will still upsell extra options that are not integrated here, so this may still not create a universal solution.

• Dangers of building someonelse's brand.  Loss of control over the content and building someone else brand - are solved in this case by both the white label solution and the perishable nature of recruitment classifieds.

• Upside potential - or avoidance of loss. We were unable to obtain enough data to create more than a rough estimate of the ROI from adding the system.  Since the model is based on posting fees, which vary, we can only take a swing at the number.  Some media could simply bake the fees into packages to provide a better product, though most add on an extra charge.  A $30 to $50 fee that is added, for example, would yield $3000 to $5000 for every 100 ads upsold. At 33% sell through  that's about $30,000 to $50,000 per 1,000 ads. Partners we talked to were happy with the order-taking system and the upsells, although they are seeing an incremental rather than transformative gains.

• New categories. The integration of national vertical magazines is also a plus - theoretically this allows for higher end jobs in specialties such as health and business to be filled by out-of-state job seekers entering the network via a trade publication.

• Speed of the company's own programmers to "keep up" with industry changes. This is the real downside of useing this platform for order-taking at scale - will there be technical problems and can the technology keep up? Any platform is always in a race against competing options. The good judgement and commitment of the programing team is critical. This company has mixed reviews from insiders in this category.

Overall, we give RealMatch a thumbs up for concept, pricing and integration, the jury is out on long term technical capabilities.

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.


classifieds, recruitment, tweetmyjobs, real match, concordmonitor, job boards, aftercollege.