Massive growth in website traffic and a record-low cost per click. How an innovative optimized creatives format exceeded expectations in a long-term programmatic campaign for a leading Slovak health insurance company.

We partnered with one of the most prominent health insurance companies in the Slovak market. As a leader in innovation, the company provides its policyholders with above-standard care and a wide portfolio of financial and digital benefits. The health insurance sector is highly competitive. Brands must continuously build trust while also encouraging people to take real action, particularly during the peak insurance switching season, whether that means switching providers or staying with their current insurer.

Every year, the client runs comprehensive multichannel communication that combines brand building with performance marketing. A programmatic RTB campaign became an important pillar of the media mix. We managed the campaign with the aim of reaching relevant audiences in a trustworthy environment and driving as many genuinely interested users as possible to the insurer's website. The campaign was designed as a long-term strategy running from April to September, precisely when the topic of switching health insurance providers is most relevant in the Slovak market.

To achieve the performance objectives while efficiently managing the enormous volume of creative assets, we moved away from the conventional approach to broad display advertising buying. From day one, we implemented an automated click-maximization strategy that dynamically identified users with the highest likelihood of interacting with an ad and immediately visiting the insurer's website.

A key decision was the implementation of the Optimized Creatives format. This format combines text and visuals in real time, displaying a personalized ad tailored to each user. The algorithm automatically tests the performance of individual combinations and prioritizes the most successful ones. This saves time on graphic production and reduces the cost per click thanks to higher click-through rates.

Thanks to the diversity of benefits and intelligent format delivery, the campaign remained dynamic throughout all six months. The system continuously tested different messages and visual combinations, helping prevent banner blindness among the audience.

With such an extensive campaign structure, continuous human and technological oversight of ad delivery was essential. We divided the optimization process into two key pillars.

The first was complete protection of the brand's reputation. To guarantee a safe environment and exclude low-quality or fraudulent websites, such as MFA sites or clickbait pages, we restricted the campaign from the outset to a strict whitelist of the 50 largest and highest-quality Slovak publishers. This eliminated the need to reactively exclude questionable domains and ensured that every impression was delivered in a premium editorial environment.

The second pillar focused on refining formats and supporting top performance. Since the quality of the advertising environment was already secured through the whitelist, we could dedicate our optimization efforts entirely to improving creative performance. Our specialists regularly analyzed the performance of individual banner sizes, removed weaker formats from the campaign, and automatically reallocated the budget toward the most successful benefits.

The decision to use Optimized Creatives delivered an immediate breakthrough in efficiency. Within the first few days of launch, the campaign generated results that significantly exceeded the client's planned objectives and set a new standard well above our internal display advertising benchmarks.

The substantial reduction in media buying costs allowed us to drive several times more genuinely interested users to the insurer's website than originally expected under a standard campaign setup.

The overall click-through rate reached 1.50%, while the Optimized Creatives format alone achieved an impressive 2.04%. This result significantly exceeds the typical market average for display advertising.

The overall cost per click dropped to €0.22, while delivery exclusively through Optimized Creatives achieved an even lower CPC of €0.19. Compared to the client's original target of €0.80, this represents a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of the invested budget.

Despite the primary focus on clicks, premium placements allowed us to maintain an excellent level of ad viewability. Ad viewability exceeded 90%.

When optimizing for CTR, we typically achieve viewability of around 70%. A value of 90% is significantly above average and represents an exceptional result.

The Zircon Tree Team's Perspective

In this project, Optimized Creatives proved to be a bullseye, whether in terms of driving down the cost per click or maximizing traffic. Our RTB team gained clear proof of this format's strength, which opens the door to deploying it strategically for other complex performance clients as well.