URX Drives Repeat Traffic to SeatGeek's Mobile App

For ticket aggregator and sales platform SeatGeek, new customers are silver, but repeat customers are gold. Being easier to target based on past purchases and more likely to convert, return customers hold great potential. Privy to the value of its existing customer base, SeatGeek's team was eager to boost its app's revisit rate and sought a vendor with the capability to re-engage users. URX, a provider of deep linking and retargeting for mobile apps, stood out, and the two began working together in November 2013.

With a product catalog that continues to grow as event tickets are added, dynamically generating relevant advertisements had been a challenge for SeatGeek. A geographic component further complicated things—users in Chicago weren't interested in seeing ads for an event happening in New York City, for example, so the product catalog varied by both day and location. To drive past customers to their app, SeatGeek's marketing team knew the company needed a sophisticated retargeting solution.

"In SeatGeek's case, deep linking was essential because of the products that they sell," John Milinovich, CEO of URX, explains. "An advertisement that sends a user to the SeatGeek app home page is a shot in the dark. What are the chances that a customer is going to spend time browsing through events, aimlessly searching? When the link takes customers to the buy page for a specific event they've shown interest in, they're much more likely to convert."

URX appealed to SeatGeek because of its ability to not only retarget ad content, but also ad form. "SeatGeek is continually looking to apply new technologies to move our business forward. When learning about URX's ability to dynamically render creative for each of our ticket offerings and match them to users who have the highest likelihood of converting, it was clear there was a good opportunity to work with each other," Russ D'Souza, founder of SeatGeek, says.

URX's Dynamic Creative Engine solution uses customers' past behavior to determine what events they might be interested in and optimizes the ad format and size based on past ad performance. To build the ad, URX pulls data from SeatGeek's catalog into its own native templates to create the design. Once completed and launched, the ad appears on screen as users interact with other apps on their mobile devices, and rotates through ticket offers so that customers see advertisements for different events.

Since it began working with URX, SeatGeek has seen an 11 percent increase in revenue per targeted user and a 9 percent increase in app open rate. What most impressed D'Souza, however, was that with URX, SeatGeek's click-through rate was 1.2 percent, roughly three times the mobile display industry average, he says. Milinovich attributes this to putting products and events directly in front of users through the deep links, as opposed to more generic ads. "It just gives users a much more clear incentive to engage," Milinovich says.

In addition to improvements in app engagement, SeatGeek noticed a correlation between the campaign and increased purchases on the Web. As the company continues to use URX's solution, it plans to keep an eye on how its mobile advertising campaign is affecting Web purchases.

The Payoff

Since implementing URX's mobile retargeting solution, SeatGeek has seen:

• an 11 percent increase in revenue per targeted user;
• a 9 percent increase in app open rate; and
• a 1.2 percent click-through rate, which is 3 times the mobile display industry average.

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