Who the client is
GymBeam is a rapidly growing e-commerce brand in the fitness and healthy lifestyle sector, operating in more than 15 countries across Central and Eastern Europe. It offers over 3,000 products, from dietary supplements and functional foods to sports accessories and apparel. In 2020, GymBeam decided to enter the Polish market.
The starting point
- Debut in a new market under unfavorable conditions. GymBeam launched sales in the Polish market just before the outbreak of the pandemic. Lockdowns and the closure of gyms changed consumers' everyday lives almost overnight; traditional shopping channels disappeared, while online sales came to the fore.
- Scaling activities in a rapidly growing environment. The growing volume of data and products placed new demands on the team managing campaigns. Manual ad management was sufficient initially, but as scale grew, automation, process optimization, and better use of product data were needed.
- Established competition. Polish consumers already had access to well-known online stores offering supplements and fitness products. It was essential to prove that GymBeam could deliver new value.
- Home workout boom. The goal was to achieve profitability as quickly as possible while competing with one of the 100 largest e-commerce companies in Poland, while responding to the rapidly growing home workout trend.
What was done
The main premise was to allocate the highest possible budget to Google Ads campaigns with the potential to generate the highest return:
- Product campaigns, divided into GymBeam branded products and non-branded products.
- Search campaigns targeting the most important category phrases, plus DSA campaigns (dynamic search ads) based on indexed subpages and a dedicated file containing links to products.
- Google Display Network remarketing targeting users who added products to their cart but did not complete a purchase; in the following months, remarketing to previous buyers.
A schedule of regular monthly video calls summarised the previous 30 days, with constant email contact in between.
Automation
- Connecting the product feed with search ads. The product feed was integrated with Google Ads in both Shopping campaigns and text ads; prices, availability and other parameters were automatically updated four times a day through dynamic variables.
- Smart Shopping campaigns replaced outdated PLA campaigns. The account was generating several hundred conversions per month, enough to entrust sales optimization to Google Ads algorithms; the freed time went into strategic analysis and macro-level optimization, defining the required ROI level for each campaign.
- Profitability and ROI data in the Google Ads panel. The client sent profitability data for individual products directly to the website source, so campaign effectiveness could be assessed almost in real time and the ROAS level required for a campaign to be profitable was known exactly.
In parallel, GymBeam developed blog content, optimized product descriptions, improved the category structure, and ran influencer marketing (including a creator with one of the largest Polish Instagram and YouTube accounts dedicated to home workouts).
The result
After less than a year and a half of cooperation, in July 2021, enough data had been gathered to change the main conversion in the campaigns: instead of optimizing for revenue, the focus moved to return on investment (ROI).
- By October 2021, Google Ads campaigns were generating a stable return at a level that ensured profitability. Spending increased by 174%, while the number of monthly orders grew by 510%.
- Google Analytics, January 2021 (all campaigns optimized for ROAS) vs January 2022 (optimized for ROI): the number of users visiting the website increased by 73.20%; the conversion rate increased by 28.35%.
These results were achieved primarily by changing the conversion type in Google Ads; few new campaigns were launched in that period.
What happened next
Google Ads algorithms need time to "learn" based on the data provided; the full transition to ROI-based optimization, introduced in July 2021, took around three months. Connecting product feed data with Google text ads allowed a complete campaign structure to be built in one step, within a single tool.
