News Limited is one of Australia’s largest media companies, spanning newspapers, magazines, online, and subscription TV. We publish over 140 online and printed newspapers in major Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as in suburban areas.
Classified advertising is a key revenue stream across all our markets, but traditionally booking and billing classifieds has been a manual and time-consuming process. We wanted to implement a solution that would allow customers to serve themselves by placing ads online.
The Google App Engine has enabled customers to do just that. We chose Google as the application is easy to build, easy to maintain and simple to scale as the user base and data storage grows. Functionalities within the Google App Engine environment, such as BigQuery - the prediction application programming interface - have also been really useful. For example we do in depth analysis of the ads, item pricing, and providing an internal reporting tool using Big Query.
We worked with 3 wks our Google Cloud Platform development partner to develop a self-service, production booking and billing system - www.traderoo.com.au - which we have developed on Google App Engine. It’s proving to be a real winner for both our business and our customers.
It’s fundamentally changed the way customers engage with our company - creating a more usable experience and superb responsiveness. It’s easy to use, and gives more control over ad content as well as the ability to publish ads online immediately. Online ads are free, while print ads are optional and require a small fee, but complement online ads by extending the advertiser’s reach.
When customers book ads using the Traderoo website, they get automatic email notification from the platform that tells them how their advertisement is performing. Traderoo is optimised for PC, laptop, smartphone and tablet so the browser and ad placement remains consistent, no matter what device our customers are using.
The real advantage for us is that our classified business has achieved faster time to market, lower costs and less overheads in the form of call centre time and manual data entry. The site has been a huge success, and we look forward to continuing using Google App Engine as we develop Traderoo further.
Guest post by Joshua Lowcock, head of commercial platforms & products for News Limited
