More than 100,000 events promoted at the right time and the right place through Ad Automation

Reservix is one of the leading ticketing companies in Germany. The Reservix GmbH includes the platforms ADticket.de, reservix.de, and reservix.at, serving over 7,500 organizers in the fields of concerts, sports, theater, tourism, tours, and exhibitions.

Reservix employs around 480 staff members across more than 10 locations in Germany and Austria. Tickets are distributed through an online platform, an in-house hotline, and over 3,200 nationwide ticket offices. Our collaboration with Reservix is centered around the common goal of smoothly selling as many tickets as possible, optimizing the use of our advertising budget within a real-time system.

The large number of events with different dates, locations, and durations results in significant effort when it comes to targeted promotion. The goal is to not only showcase the appropriate offerings but also to be ultimately profitable.

Managing hundreds of thousands of events manually presents its limits. If responses are delayed, past events continue to be promoted, resulting in unnecessary costs and a negative user experience, while new events are offered with delays. The manual process of creating new events with specific keywords and targeted ads is also very time-consuming. 

Furthermore, optimizing active events poses a challenge. Smart bidding systems play a crucial role in this aspect; however these systems - to put it kindly - were too autonomous and didn't allow any say when it came to incorporating 1st party signals beyond the standardized ones.

Automated event integration

To overcome all these challenges and provide the best chances for profitable scaling, we developed an automated system to meet all these requirements.

The foundation is a shared database designed to prioritize all events based on selectable criteria and suggest a selection for the next integration. In the next step, event-specific additional information is added for each event. Reservix's in-house marketing team reviews, qualifies, and submits this information, automatically creating new campaigns and updating or extending existing ones.

To enable this, it was necessary to develop a connector between the Reservix API and the Sunlab API, which further allows fully automated processes, such as deactivating an event once tickets are no longer available.

These updates occur not only at certain intervals, but even the slightest changes within the data are detected and then transferred to Google Ads in real-time. This ensures a marketing strategy that is always up to date.

Through our automation, we not only promote an optimal marketing strategy but also the development of optimized work processes by reducing necessary tasks and associated time commitments to a minimum! Where numerous manual steps in the Google Ads interface were previously required to promote an event at multiple locations, automation now accomplishes this in just one step. For this, an average of 5 minutes is required, whereas in manual processes, it took at least 20 minutes per location. This results in a time savings of at least 75 %! The full potential of an automation solution, however, is truly reflected in its scalability. With it, time commitments remain consistent regardless of the number of locations, leading to significant time savings compared to manual processes as more locations are added.

Customized Smart Bidding

Manual bidding strategies have become obsolete in recent years, as they generally require significant time investment and deliver only surface-level results. Through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, this problem was solved with smart bidding. A machine operates 24/7 in real-time, continuously assessing the effectiveness of bids and making optimizations multiple times a day. These adjustments are highly customized for each event, right down to the keyword level.

There are different approaches to smart bidding. Traditional systems follow fixed rules and require specific campaign structures. This means that existing events need to be extracted from current campaigns and placed into new ones to achieve new goals. This entails two fundamental problems: the time spent shifts rather than being truly reduced, and important historical data that are necessary for an optimal advertising strategy is lost in the process.

Sunlab recognized this problem early on and developed BiddingLab, a smart bidding solution that not only provides all the benefits of an automated and goal-oriented bidding strategy but also allows more input when it comes to making effective decisions. This way, the Reservix in-house marketing team can implement custom rule sets. For example, selected event groups within large campaign structures are identified and optimized independently, without generating additional effort.

Through ad automation and the accelerated and simplified integration workflow, a +122 % increase in event advertising was achieved within the first 12 months. Combined with Sunlab's Smart Bidding solution, BiddingLab, this new advertising approach led to an +86 % increase in revenue and a +23 % increase in profitability.

Reservix aims to further enhance its efficiency in collaboration with Sunlab. Central to this is the constant development and optimization of the system. In this context, we also keep an eye on current trends, such as AI, to potentially use them to support further success.