How we boosted B2B and B2C sales with RTB advertising through precise geo-targeting

For our clients, we manage other types of advertising besides the classic PPC campaigns, Performance Max campaigns or social media campaigns. In case we want to use very precise geo-targeting, we have found RTB advertising to be very useful. It gets its abbreviation from the English name Real Time Bidding, so this type of advertising allows advertisers to bid for advertising space on websites in real time. When a user visits a site that offers banner ad space, this information is immediately sent to the RTB auction system. Advertisers can then “bid” for this space in real time, with the winning advertiser getting the right to display their ad to the user.

RTB advertising offers precise geo-targeting within a perimeter of tens to hundreds of meters. This allows us to target advertising to individual buildings or entire campuses where our defined target audience is located. In addition to geolocation targeting, AdForm, the RTB management environment, offers audience targeting. These audiences (groups of people with similar interests) can be purchased by the advertiser from other companies or built by the advertiser. In our several years of experience working with RTB advertising, we have found it useful not to purchase other people’s audiences, which can be inaccurate, so we build the target audiences ourselves based on their previous Google searches or visits to competitor websites.

How we drove lift truck sales with RTB advertising

We used RTB advertising for our long-term client STILL, which focuses on B2B sales of pallet trucks and pallet jacks. To ensure that our banner ads were displayed to a relevant target audience that works with pallet trucks, we used precise geo-targeting to large logistics sites. This allowed us to display the banners not only to high-ranking managers in such companies, but also to truck drivers or material handling workers.

We used a similar strategy for mobile car washes for material handling equipment. We targeted RTB advertising to large logistics centers, which were one of the target groups for mobile car washes. The campaign targeted in this way achieved a CTR (click-through rate) of up to 10.4%, and we were able to drive a large number of relevant and converting users to the prepared impact pages.

How we used RTB advertising to drive sales of concrete paving

We used similar geo-targeting for a sub-contract for client Presbeton, which offers not only concrete pavers but also other concrete elements. In this case, our development team exported from freely available maps the exact coordinates to the large construction material sites where people go when undertaking any kind of renovation.

We complemented such targeted RTB campaigns with classic content and video PPC campaigns from Google Ads, in which we targeted competitor websites or sites that clients visit before they tackle a paving purchase. In this case, these were pool dealer websites. As a result, our ads were also shown to people who were just considering a new outdoor pool and could be expected to deal with the surrounding concrete pavers in the near future. Our assumptions turned out to be correct and we drove more than 15,000 users to the client’s website through RTB ads.