Online Pharmaceutical – Patika24
Scaling an online business from zero to 4 Million EUR annual revenue in 4 years. How to do it so?
Patika24 backed by some physical pharmacies launched in the end of 2017 and bootstrapped from scratch. We have been working with them since its infancy gaining the very first order from Google Ads. Magical moment! Ever since the company has scaled to a multi-million EUR business.
Let’s see how we cooperated along the way.
Problem Statement
Entering a completely new online market with no digital advertising experience could be a hassle. The co-founders felt the business opportunity was there, however, they could not validate and quantify the size of the potential.
After they approached us, we started with a thorough keyword analysis by which we made proper estimation on the size of the online pharma industry based on which they concluded to give it a go.
Except the webshop development (back then: Magento 2), Markestic configured everything from zero. Ecommerce measurement, each and every ad account, product feeds and so on and so forth.
PRO: no need to clean up any unprofessional mess created by others.
CON: no campaign history, no data, no remarketing list. There’s no nothing to build upon!
Overall: we loved and embraced the challenge as we had to fill a completely blank page.
Domain: patika24.hu
Industry: online pharma
Employee: 25+
Partnership with Markestic: 2017 - ongoing
Main competitors
Balázs Simon
Co-Founder at Patika24
Solution
In the spirit of transparency, there is no magical secret sauce behind the success of Patika24.
2 complementary teams have got together. They have been doing their part amazingly (wide product range, reasonable pricing, stable webshop, quick delivery), and we did ours on the marketing end likewise.
We configured and tested each and every ad channel, campaign type that could possibly make sense from an ecommerce perspective then narrowed them down to a channel mix that still works like steroids.
The cornerstone of the applied marketing mix is Google Ads (Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Discovery, App Install, etc.) supported by many other channels (mostly: Facebook, Instagram, price comparison sites, Criteo).
We sophisticated the campaign structure as far as it logically still made sense (couple of 1000 ad groups to be a bit more exact). The applied paid media campaigns are supported and complemented with some marketing automation tools to further reduce the advertising costs and social shopping (e.g: Facebook Shop) to broaden the potential market reach.
We also run email marketing campaigns as well as CRO (conversion rate optimisation) tests to optimise the efficiency of the webshop.”
Results
Some tangible results from the recent years:
- after the launch, in the first 1.5 years ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) grew 49%point on average per month (almost 900% extra) hitting stable profitability. Since then the ultimate goal is rather scaling in volume and conquering market share than further improving ROAS.
- in the same date range, we managed to lower the initial average CPO (Cost Per Order) level by 81%.
- in the first full year (2018), we already hit 1 Million EUR in revenue and ever since the annual growth rate is always 2- or 3-digit.
Since the launch, 2 new related webshops got opened with special focus on selected product ranges.
Next goal is to go international!
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