Context

The biggest secondary ticketing marketplace in Europe — with a scale problem.

TicketSwap is the Netherlands' largest secondary ticketing platform, operating across 36 countries with over 8 million fans. Their model is built on fairness — a maximum 120% price cap protects buyers, and their reputation depends on moving inventory efficiently.

In 2022, they had 500,000 active events on the platform at any given time. For each event, tickets expire the moment the show ends. Unsold inventory isn't a missed opportunity — it's a fundamental failure of the platform's core promise.

With a small performance marketing team, the challenge wasn't budget or strategy. It was scale.

The challenge

500,000 events. One small team.

Manual campaign creation — writing keywords, ad copy, and targeting for each event — was impossible at this volume. But without highly specific, intent-matched ads, paid media campaigns were too generic to convert. Generic ads for generic events performed poorly and wasted budget.

The problem

500,000 active events across 36 markets. Each one unique — different artist, venue, city, date. Building targeted campaigns manually was impossible. Existing generic campaigns were underperforming and leaving inventory unsold.

The solution

A fully automated feed-driven system using Channable that pulled event data (artist, venue, location, date) and generated highly specific ad groups and keywords for every active event — dynamically, at scale, across all markets.

How we did it

Automation built on clean architecture.

01
Feed architecture

We structured a dynamic event feed containing all relevant fields — event name, artist, venue, city, country, date, ticket availability, and category. The feed became the single source of truth for all campaign creation.

02
Automated ad and keyword generation

Using Channable, we built templates that generated ad groups, headlines, descriptions, and keywords for every event dynamically. An event for Coldplay at the Amsterdam Arena produced ads specific to Coldplay, Amsterdam, and the exact date — not a generic "buy tickets" ad.

03
Multi-market deployment

The system was language and market-aware. UK, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium — each market got localised ad copy pulled from the feed, without duplicating manual effort.

04
Inventory-based bidding logic

Campaigns were tied to live availability. Events with more tickets available received proportionally higher bids, ensuring budget concentrated on inventory that most needed to move — automatically adjusting as events sold out.

Results

More coverage. Less work. Better outcomes.

The system launched in the Dutch market first. After proving impact within the first month, it was rolled out across all active TicketSwap markets. The results were consistent across the board.

−15%
Reduction in unsold ticket inventory — the core business metric
−10%
User acquisition cost — same budget, more buyers
+60%
Coverage increase across paid media campaigns
−80%
Team time spent on campaign creation — freed for strategy