Local online marketing: advertising is most widespread in these cities
Local businesses are often faced with the question of how to reach more potential customers and how to build trust in their brand. The answer: local online marketing. Whether searching for a restaurant or the next car repair shop: Consumers gather information online. What’s more, the majority of searches are regional. Companies can use local online advertising measures to reach potential customers in a geographically targeted way.
But in which cities do branches and companies actually rely on such measures? We at Localyzer investigated this question. Especially in Siegen, use is made of local online marketing, whereas in Salzgitter the potential is hardly used. For our analysis, we examined more than 9,600 local online marketing campaigns across Germany from 2018 to 2023 according to their impressions.
Siegen is the absolute front-runner in local advertising
The number of impressions – also called visual contacts – indicates how often advertisements appear on a screen. The ratio can provide information about how widespread a campaign actually is. Advertisements are played out most frequently in Siegen: Here the number of impressions is just under 9.3 million. On average, 90.8 advertisements per inhabitant were displayed on Localyzer in the last five years. This puts the city in North Rhine-Westphalia in first place in the study. Trier follows far behind with an average of 73 adverts per inhabitant (just under 8.1 million impressions in total). Neuss secures third place with 65.3 visual contacts (10.1 million impressions).
Advertisements are also placed and displayed comparatively often in Oldenburg and Münster. In Oldenburg, residents see an ad on average around 64.3 times – in total, there have been around 11.1 million insertions there since 2018. Münster is in fifth place with 60 viewing contacts (around 19.3 million).
Local online advertising is hardly used in Salzgitter, Bottrop and Frankfurt am Main
Although the chances of success in Salzgitter are very high in terms of click rates, location-based advertising is rarely displayed. With an average of only 1.7 impressions per inhabitant (176,932 impressions in total), the large city in Lower Saxony ranks last in the city ranking. The situation is similar in Bottrop and Frankfurt am Main: Here, advertisements are displayed only 1.8 times per capita in Bottrop (215,000 in total) and 1.9 times in Frankfurt am Main (1.5 million impressions in total).
Münster leads the survey in the major city ranking.
Münster is not only ahead in the overall ranking, but also when looking at the 20 largest cities in Germany. Here Münster takes first place with around 60 ad impressions per inhabitant (around 19.3 million impressions in total). But in Wuppertal, too, companies and branches are increasingly relying on location-based online advertising campaigns: With around 47.5 impressions (17 million), the city is in second place. Finally, Essen follows in third place with around 39.5 impressions (23.1 million). So all in all, three North Rhine-Westphalian cities lead the survey.
About the study
A total of 9,619 campaigns from Localyzer customers were examined from 2018 to 2023, the cut-off date was 11.06.2023. The figures come from the Localyzer database. For better comparability, only the 20 largest cities in Germany and cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants were taken into account. The study refers to local Google and social media ads (Facebook and Instagram). The number of impressions per city was divided by the number of inhabitants. Since the database only contains campaigns from customers of the Localyzer company, Erfurt and Reutlingen were excluded from the study as extreme values due to the number of campaigns being too high and too low, respectively.
