AppFolio | Case study
Bombora’s iABM Outperforms ABM Platform in AppFolio’s Head-to-Head Test
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Overview
AppFolio (a cloud-based tech company serving the real estate industry), like many B2B advertisers, was seeking to elevate the performance of their key account ABM campaigns, to comprehensively measure campaign performance, and to demonstrate campaign impact to their cross-functional stakeholders.
Historically a user of a SaaS-based ABM platform, AppFolio partnered with Bombora to run a head-to-head test of their incumbent platform and Bombora’s intelligent Account Based Marketing or iABM (available on The Trade Desk in partnership with Chalice AI).
Challenge: Elevate ABM performance and enhance measurement
AppFolio faced significant challenges running targeted account campaigns through their incumbent ABM platform:
- Ability to make real-time optimizations to in-flight campaigns
- Optimizing account-level performance within a campaign (e.g., saturation)
- Linking investment, impressions, and accounts with internal data to measure targeted outcomes
With a long sales cycle and a complex buying committee, it was critical to AppFolio that they could drive and measure the penetration of their key account list, both in breadth and depth. Key AppFolio metrics included:
- Account Penetration: the percentage of the target accounts reached by ads.
- Account Saturation: the percentage of target accounts reached in which target roles at the accounts received a predetermined minimum number of impressions per month.
AppFolio also measured traditional cost and engagement metrics (e.g., CPM and CTR).
Head-to-Head Test: Bombora’s iABM vs. Existing ABM platform
After meeting with Bombora’s team of activation experts and digital marketing strategists, Tinuiti, AppFolio’s agency, proposed iABM as a potential solution to elevate performance.
iABM is a programmatic solution powered by Bombora’s industry-leading B2B identity and audiences, paired with a custom account-level frequency optimization algorithm built by Chalice AI, available exclusively through The Trade Desk.
Key differentiators of iABM include:
- The ability to leverage real-time reporting to modify campaigns and make adjustments like
increasing account and user frequency caps. - Frequency capping at the account level to ensure optimal penetration across and within key accounts.
- Robust performance reporting linking impression and click data from the Trade Desk with
account-level reporting from Bombora to connect performance to target accounts.
AppFolio set up a head-to-head test to compare the performance of iABM versus their incumbent ABM platform.
Throughout campaign development and testing, Bombora’s product and digital activation experts worked directly with AppFolio to provide detailed breakdowns for target account lists to improve domain matching and account selection. This allowed AppFolio’s database team to clean up account records, ensuring accurate data for continued campaign optimization.
Bombora’s hands-on collaborative support, combined with iABM’s performance driven design, led to superior results and uncovered new benchmarks for AppFolio to gauge campaign success.
Bombora’s hands-on collaborative support, combined with iABM’s performance driven design, led to superior results and uncovered new benchmarks for AppFolio to gauge campaign success.
Superior results across all key metrics: Greater impact at lower cost
At the conclusion of the A/B test, it was clear that iABM outperformed AppFolio’s incumbent ABM platform. The primary measures of success were Account Saturation and Account Penetration.
- Account Penetration Rate: iABM achieved an average penetration rate increase of 27% relative to the penetration rate achieved with the incumbent ABM solution.
- Account Saturation Rate: iABM achieved an average increase of 25% to saturation rates when compared to the incumbent ABM platform.
Matt Earls Director of Online Marketing, AppFolio
"Saturation was great. [iABM] did a great job separating our impressions and distributing them across accounts."
In addition to outstanding performance across account saturation and penetration rates, they also experienced noticeable improvements to their engagement metrics.
- Audience engagement: iABM delivered a 2.5x increase to CTR. The video completion rate through iABM
was notably higher than AppFolio’s benchmarks. - Cost reduction: CPMs from iABM campaigns were 27% lower than CPMs on their incumbent
ABM platform.
Additional drivers of campaign success: Visibility and control
AppFolio identified key iABM capabilities, including impression frequency controls and direct access to the campaign and reporting data, as drivers of superior performance.
- Enhanced control: Tinuiti, AppFolio’s agency, now fully manages AppFolio’s campaigns
in-house, enabling precise, real-time adjustments to target engaged, interest-based audiences.
“The ability for us to actually do our jobs and make all the optimizations that we want to make was key,” said Myles Gortva, Senior Strategist at Tinuiti.
- Improved reporting: iABM provided detailed, account-level reporting, allowing AppFolio to track
performance and make data-driven decisions on the accounts they care about the most.
“Being able to ingest the data and marry it up with internal data at the account level was a game-changer,” noted Matt.
“Previously, it was very difficult to do anything to the campaigns without having to reach out to the DSP to have them do it on the back end,” said Myles. “We had no levers to really pull and very limited visibility.”