GNC Boosts Conversions by 8.4% with RTB House and Ovative Group

A global leader in health and wellness innovation, GNC motivates people to take care of themselves, reach their goals, and make the most of their self-care journeys. From vitamins to supplements and health products, GNC offers a mix of company-owned brands and exclusive third-party products through its well established retail presence, wholesale partnerships, and growing digital commerce channel.

Ovative Group is an independent, full-funnel media, measurement, and creative firm that helps leading brands drive profitable growth. Powered by EMRgeTM, their proprietary marketing intelligence platform, the Ovative team unifies planning, buying, measurement, and optimization across the full marketing lifecycle and across industries including retail, CPG, healthcare, telecommunications, and more.

With a strong national brick-and-mortar presence already in place, GNC had a significant opportunity to accelerate growth by expanding its digital direct-to-consumer (DTC) business. The brand set out to invigorate its DTC channel by generating qualified demand, increasing meaningful engagement, and converting that engagement into incremental revenue. To achieve those goals, GNC partnered with Ovative Group and RTB House to refine its performance marketing approach. Together, the teams aligned on a structured full-funnel investment strategy designed to move beyond volume-based traffic acquisition toward high-intent audiences that drive measurable revenue impact.

To bring new, high-quality customers to GNC’s DTC channel, RTB House implemented a full-funnel performance campaign designed to drive customer acquisition and engagement, retarget the most high-value prospects, and then spark conversions to generate incremental revenue. The campaign leveraged RTB House’s LLM-powered Audiences to identify and prioritize high-intent, high-value users and optimize engagement. Deep Learning-powered algorithms, together with the RTB House user engagement optimization model, ensured that the prospecting portion of the campaign reached users that would engage (and potentially become new customers) by showing them the most relevant GNC products at the right time. As the technology continuously learned and improved, the campaign scaled, ramping up high-quality traffic to the GNC website.

By making nuanced contextual connections and surfacing the most relevant products from GNC’s product catalog, the campaign drove significant gains in engagement and conversions for the brand. Personalized, product-driven advertising using GNC’s dynamic product feed, implemented by Ovative to support lower-funnel conversion-focused campaigns, delivered a fresh stream of qualified traffic to the site, fostering meaningful consumer interactions and translating engagement signals into measurable performance gains.

Ads reached 57M users in four months, triggering an 8.4% bump in DTC conversions. Notably, 44% of conversions came from users who were initially reached through upper-funnel campaigns, validating our ability to identify and prime high-quality audiences before they reached the point of purchase. The campaign also significantly overperformed targets for engagement, saving 49% on average cost-per session vs established goals.