The savings on day one covered the agency fee for months
Managing the entire paid media across eight countries, and a classic lesson in how much money is lost without negative keywords.
Introduction
Extreme Digital was previously the leading online electronics marketplace in Hungary, and was present in seven further neighbouring markets. The company’s separate story ended in 2019 with a strategic merger led by the second-largest marketplace, eMAG.
We were given the opportunity to manage all of Extreme Digital’s paid media activity across all 8 countries, including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Criteo and Waze Ads campaigns.
Challenge
In 2018 Extreme Digital decided to outsource its entire PPC management to a digital team that could handle multiple accounts across several countries at once. Their business goals included making the international operation and the paid media sources profitable, as well as further optimising the Hungarian accounts and making them scalable.
The ad accounts were fundamentally in good shape, but experience shows that even on accounts this large there is always room for improvement.
Solution
With its several thousand products on offer, Extreme Digital had a complex Google Ads account structure, combined with many keyword-based and dynamic search (DSA) campaigns. DSA efficiently fills the gaps where keyword-based campaigns miss queries, but both campaign types require constant monitoring and negative-keyword tactics.
Since most of the ad spend went to these campaigns, this is where we began the deeper investigation, by evaluating the search terms. We identified several thousand queries that brought irrelevant, non-convertible traffic, and ultimately burned budget with nothing to show for it.
Channels and tools
Results
We cleaned up the Google Ads accounts in the very first days of the partnership and filtered them with several thousand negative keywords. This immediately saved an amount of ad budget that covered our agency fee for months.
After that we optimised the other ad accounts as well, and introduced highly effective, short-term sales promotions on a weekly or fortnightly basis, supported by every available channel. We also tested supporting offline sales with online promotions, some approaches worked excellently, others came to nothing.
Summary
Ad accounts often hold untapped, easily reachable opportunities, especially on larger accounts where complexity can hide the problems. The maths speaks for itself: if a company spends €50,000 a month on advertising, even a 5% efficiency gain is €2,500 saved, and in all honesty, uncovering 5% in a comprehensive account is no particular challenge for an experienced specialist.
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