Who the client is
The client is a global manufacturer of garden and patio equipment, actively operating in 19 markets across Europe, the USA, Australia, the developed economies of Asia, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, and Central America. Its offer includes over 1,000 products, all bearing its own brand, in the premium segment, durable and covered by a multi-year warranty. The business is seasonal: the most intensive marketing and sales period falls between March and July.
The starting point
- A focus on supporting the distribution network, not online sales. Although the client had its own online store, the main goal was to increase brand recognition and translate that into higher sales within its existing distribution network in Poland.
- Strong competition in the market. The Polish market already featured well-recognized brands that had been investing heavily in branding and media activities for years.
- A cookie bot limiting data. The cookie bot present on the website significantly limited the ability to build audience lists and analyze data, particularly important for awareness channels such as programmatic.
- No historical data on the local market. Poland was a new market, with no prior benchmarks, statistics, or buyer personas. The strategy had to be built almost from scratch.
What was done
Work started immediately with regional managers in Europe and the analytics team in the USA, with a schedule of regular meetings. Compared to established foreign markets, Poland initially performed considerably worse, particularly in e-commerce results across all channels.
A strategy based on data and branding campaigns
The main premise of the programmatic strategy was to make maximum use of the budget on awareness-building campaigns:
- Seasonal campaigns: spring season kickoff promotions, including a free gift for people who purchased the client's product (not only in the online store).
- Display campaigns based on Google audience lists, 1st party data, and machine learning mechanisms from Google Analytics 360, taking into account impressions as well as clicks.
- Masthead reach campaigns on the YouTube homepage, configured from the Display & Video 360 panel.
- Video campaigns on YouTube based on remarketing lists from the Masthead campaigns, GA360 data, and Google audience lists.
- Product campaigns: dynamic remarketing using a feed from Google Studio and remarketing lists from earlier branding activities.
- Private Deals: video campaigns on the Spotify platform.
After just two months, the branding activities began to bring results, including in the online store's performance. A growing bounce rate and declining post-click sessions, typical after entering new markets in programmatic, were limited through better audience targeting based on GA 360 data (mainly view-through conversions).
Split of KPIs across prospecting and remarketing
- Separate strategies for two segments, new traffic and remarketing, with close cooperation with the client's analytics department to develop personalized bidding algorithms.
- Custom bidding algorithms: micro-conversions were defined and assigned values calculated from actual consumer behavior. One script maximized ROAS among users visiting the online store; a second minimized the cost per session in prospecting campaigns.
- Brand Lift Surveys: monthly studies on YouTube analyzing the impact of video campaigns on brand recognition and competitive advantage, identifying the most effective videos, the best-converting audience lists, and the demographic groups with the highest recognition.
The result
Programmatic activities in Poland in 2021 ran from February to August. The new season in March 2022 started with the infrastructure, audience lists, ad materials and personalized bidding algorithms built the previous year.
After the first three months of the programmatic campaign, all the goals set were reached while reducing the budget by 60% compared to the same period the previous year. Google Analytics 360 data (e-commerce section relating to DV360), first three months of the 2021/2022 season (March to May) compared:
- a 57% reduction in cost per session,
- a 116.08% increase in ROAS,
- a 93% reduction in cost per conversion.
These results were achieved primarily through the custom bidding algorithms. During the off-season (September to February), no activities other than dynamic remarketing in DV360 were carried out.
What happened next
The trust the client placed in the team resulted in a long-term collaboration that continues (see the weather-based campaign test for the same client).
"We have a weekly call to talk about what was accomplished the past seven days and what we're going to work on in the next seven. They're very responsive; communication is really great compared to the agency we worked with before. If there's a need for an ad hoc call, we use a chat channel or email."
