As we get closer to the holiday season, pet owners begin the search for sitters. Here is a story about how Rover.com partnered with Google to build a successful business and network of more than 65,000 pet sitters and dog walkers across more than 10,000 cities.
Rover, the nation’s largest network of pet sitters and dog walkers, recently announced a $40 million Series E round of funding and is on track to nearly triple its revenue again this year, after nearly tripling last year. Over the last three years, Rover has grown nine times faster than the next largest competitor and is the market share leader in every major metropolitan area.
A key aspect of Rover’s success has been its adoption of mobile strategy. Only two years ago, less than 5 percent of Rover’s traffic from AdWords was coming from mobile phones, and now it’s over half. As the team realized how fast the traffic was shifting to mobile devices, Google was there to guide them on taking advantage of mobile specific ads, bids and landing pages.
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For pet sitting and in-home dog boarding, the busiest times are when people travel—especially around the holidays. Google Trends helps Rover predict when spikes in certain searches will happen so they can meet customer demand. Using AdWords, they make an extra effort to market to dog lovers that might make a great pet sitter ahead of the holidays.
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