Indeed Connects More Job Seekers to Their Next Best Role with LiveRamp

The Challenge

The digital advertising landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. Third-party cookies, the traditional workhorse for audience targeting, are rapidly becoming obsolete due to privacy concerns and browser restrictions. This monumental change poses major challenges to brand advertisers who need new ways to reach, engage, and understand their customers across digital interactions.

Indeed, the number one job site in the world, recognized the significant risks and challenges in continuing to rely on third-party cookies for their audience engagement strategy. The company has over 350M unique monthly visitors, 245M resumes on file, and more than 980M ratings and reviews that help provide job seekers free access to job searches and company research.

This industry shift away from traditional customer identifiers would directly impact Indeed’s ability to reach and target job seekers offsite, measure campaign performance, and personalize the job seeker experience.

Indeed’s Reach Team knew they needed a secure, scalable, and resilient identity solution to enable them to eliminate their dependency on cookies as well as preserve and improve off-site ad performance.

The Solution

Indeed partnered with LiveRamp, the leader in data collaboration, to upgrade and enhance their existing digital advertising workflows and integrate them seamlessly within their existing AWS customer data infrastructure.

Indeed’s Reach Team turned to LiveRamp’s durable, privacy-centric identifier, RampID, to replace third-party cookies everywhere their advertising reached job seekers. By leveraging LiveRamp’s AWS Embedded Identity Resolution solution, Indeed was able to resolve first-party data to RampID directly within their cloud environment, allowing them to minimize data movement and accelerate speed to delivery. LiveRamp’s built-in privacy controls also further protects Indeed’s customer data, guarding sensitive identifiers against re-identification risks from downstream partners.

Indeed then leveraged LiveRamp’s AWS Embedded Translation solution to connect their data with their advertising partners for activation and measurement, delivering greater accuracy in a privacy-centric approach. For example, Indeed’s Reach Team was able to architect new identity-powered workflows with Freewheel’s Beeswax programmatic platform. Beeswax, which has full support for the RampID identifier in the bid stream, could then provide Indeed with powerful real-time bidding and enhanced campaign performance reporting at a person-centered level. 

Indeed’s new approach helped them innovate in several key areas:

• Audience expansion: LiveRamp’s comprehensive identity solution enabled Indeed to consolidate its first-party data and develop a more holistic view of potential customers, encompassing not just browsing behavior but also offline data sources. This broader perspective would expand Indeed’s addressable audience – a game-changer for Indeed’s ability to connect employers and unfilled job roles with relevant job seekers.
• Improved targeting: Leveraging LiveRamp’s privacy-focused, person-based identifiers, Indeed can now deliver targeted advertising with laser focus. By pinpointing the ideal candidates for specific job openings, Indeed’s Reach Team could ensure their messages resonated with the right job seekers at the right time –  minimizing wasted ad spend and maximizing campaign effectiveness.
• Actionable insights: LiveRamp’s identity solution facilitated more accurate campaign measurement by providing deeper insights into user behavior across different channels. With these insights, Indeed could optimize their campaigns for maximum impact and return on investment (ROI).
• AWS-Architected Framework: LiveRamp’s embedded capabilities within AWS enabled Indeed to bring identity infrastructure to their cloud environment to maximize efficiency, increase performance, minimize data movement, and accelerate time-to-market for these solutions.

Results

Indeed’s forward-thinking approach yielded significant improvements across the team’s R&D efforts:

• Re-targeting audience growth of 54%: This substantial audience expansion allowed Indeed to cast a wider net, reaching a much broader pool of job seekers. This translated to a significant increase in brand awareness for employers and a wider range of job seekers to fill low-supply job opportunities – a win-win for the Indeed platform.
• Response rate soars by 20%: Powered by identity, Indeed’s more precise targeting capabilities resulted in a significant boost in audience engagement. Indeed’s off-site ads resonated more effectively, translating to more qualified leads for employers and a more efficient job search process for candidates.
• Data-driven optimization: Improved, person-based measurement capabilities provided by LiveRamp allowed Indeed to make more granular data-driven decisions to optimize their campaigns for maximum effectiveness, ensuring better ROI and more efficient allocation of platform resources.

“Indeed, in partnership with LiveRamp, has been able to actively close the gap on reaching all job seekers and improving measurement, even in the face of third-party cookie deprecation,” said Paul Bloom, Senior Product Manager, Reach Team. “Indeed has been able to provide confidence to its employers that reach and targeting solutions will not lose scale due to third-party cookie deprecation, deploying real-time solutions at scale to maintain targeting capabilities on first-party data.”