Performance marketing: Google Ads

Decathlon

Performance Brand campaigns Social media SEO

Thanks to us, Decathlon set a new record

264 %

The turnover from Google Ads campaigns has increased by 264% year-on-year.

31 %

The share of cost of turnover decreased by 31 % over the same period.

Challenge

For the largest companies, growth opportunities are harder to find

The best ones in the field tend to have their things set up properly. Therefore, when we applied for the tender of the world's largest sports equipment retailer (over 1,600 stores in 57 countries), we did not expect to encounter a digital gold mine of untapped potential.

The Decathlon company launched a new e-commerce store recently, and until all processes were fine-tuned, it didn't make sense to support traffic with large investments. Things started to moving in 2019, along with the expansion of the internal online marketing team, which grew from one person to 4 people. It was at this time that Decathlon decided to announce a tender for a new agency.

As part of the tender, we analyzed the settings and performance of existing campaigns in Google Ads in great detail and presented an audit to the client, which revealed great potential for growth in e-commerce turnover. After winning the tender and taking over the Decathlon campaigns, the results did not take long.

How to

We started from scratch

First we had to solve the problem of the feed, which is crucial for the automation of campaigns. At the client’s side, different people were feeding the product database with information, but each of them in a slightly different way. The database was therefore inconsistent and difficult to use for campaigns.

The most consistent was the crumb navigation categorization, which unfortunately was not in the feed at all and it was not even easy to export. Therefore, we wrote a script that drew crumb navigation from the web, and we then paired it into the feed.

After writing the script, we found out that it is technically possible to scrap only products that are currently in stock. However, we did not want to lose previously obtained information just because the product was temporarily unavailable.

Therefore, we created a database where all historical data from individual scrapping began to be stored. If we did not obtain data for the product during the last scrapping, we automatically added the ones from the last known crumb.

The feed also needed to be adapted for comparison shopping websites. At the beginning, the client had only 30% of products from the entire store paired, a number that we raised to 62%. At Heureka.cz (biggest comparison shopping website in the Czech republic), we have also obtained a "customer verified" certificate, without which it is not possible to bid on products. Up to 50% of client’s website traffic came from these bidding positions at Heureka.cz.

The last big change was the promotion of popular products at the expense of the less sold ones. Within each category, we began to automatically determine bestsellers every day based on sales and units sold. We labeled them in the feed and according to popularity we bid them differently in campaigns. In addition, the algorithm for calculating popularity can be freely modified, which is why we have included other variables in the calculation.

Services for client

Impact

Turnover is increasing, costs are going down

264 % The turnover from Google Ads campaigns has increased by 264% year-on-year.

31 % The share of cost of turnover decreased by 31 % over the same period.

The turnover from Google Ads campaigns has increased by 264% year-on-year since we took reins of Decathlon’s online campaigns. By contrast, the share of cost of turnover decreased by 31% over the same period, thus saving the client’s money. The year-on-year turnover growth on Heureka.cz reached an incredible 270%.