PPC AGENCIES ARE NOT MADE EQUAL

Delticom AG is the European market leader for online tyre and wheel sales and distribution. They operate 140 online stores in 42 countries, with Repeat being selected to take over the Google Ads management for the UK store, mytyres.co.uk, from the incumbent agency.

The My Tyres UK site has tyres for all types of vehicle, from cars and motorbikes to trucks and RV’s. There’s thousands of options available on the site, catering for everyone.

One of the funnest parts about working with Delticom is that we have insight into the Google Ads performance stats for each country on a weekly basis, allowing direct comparison with other countries and other agencies (more on this further down).

The primary goal for Delticom and My Tyres was to recover from the poor performance from their previous agency, which was consistently at the bottom of the pile when compared to the other countries.

The client had set ROAS (return on ad spend) targets that weren’t met for the previous 6 months. Our goal was simply to meet these targets within the first 3 months, whilst still spending the full monthly budget, which is no easy task in such a short amount of time!

The strategy

As mentioned above, our strategy must completely align with the goal of achieving their client’s target ROAS as soon as possible. Here’s a list of some of the key changes we made to the account within the first 2 months, to give us the best chance of hitting the target.

• Paused any campaigns that weren’t achieving the target ROAS for the 90 days prior
• Reallocated budgets to campaigns which were achieving the target ROAS
• Mass paused any ads with poor stats (mainly old expanded text ads that have been discontinued by Google
• Turned off 1,385 ad groups (everything with -10 impressions over the past 90 days)
• Turned off 8,018 redundant keywords (all with -10 impressions past 90 days)
• Renamed a lot of the German campaign names to English (so we can understand them, making management way more efficient)
• Tidied up & paused 100s of extensions, bringing them down to account level rather than having many duplicates across campaigns
• Turned off auto generated assets
• Excluded a lot of irrelevant URLs from PMAX campaigns
• Created a MyTyres brand exclusion and added to campaigns that required it to segment brand searches from generic campaigns
• Created a “top performers” campaign to split out the top performing ad groups from the rest, giving them their own budget and bid strategy
• Budget changes throughout the month to ensure we’re spending/staying on top of budget across the account
• Removed some shared bid strategies that weren’t in use
• Consolidated any ad groups that could easily be merged
• Built one off promotion campaigns requested from the client

As you can see from the above list, much of the strategy was to tidy up the existing setup as it was extremely messy and complicated to understand, making it difficult to manage. In terms of hitting the ROAS targets, the key was to pause any poor performers and reallocate spend to high performing campaigns. It might sound easy, but when you’re dealing with multiple conflicting campaigns and hundreds of variables, it’s anything but!

The results

Now, you’re probably wondering if we hit the ROAS target, right? Well buckle in for the results. As the client doesn’t want to share to the world the ROAS targets they work to, we’ve done the next best thing and shared the percentages above or below the ROAS targets and the differences based on month-on-month and year-on-year data.

Month on month

We took over the account at the start of August 2023 and looking at the previous 5 months, the account was seriously underperforming, which is why we were brought on board.

In our first month, whilst the August ROAS was a good improvement on July, it was still far below the client’s ROAS target. However, it’s not recommended to judge an agency only one month into their management.

As you can see, September saw further improvement, getting us closer to ROAS target and gaining the trust of My Tyres’ Marketing Manager.

Then we came to October and to be honest we didn’t expect to significantly beat the ROAS targets, but we achieved a ROAS 10.71% higher than the actual target. Time to celebrate (and keep smashing targets)!

Year on year

We also wanted to include YoY data to show it’s not just a seasonal tailwind that helped us.

From the below, you can see in the 3 months before we took over the account, it was performing between 60%-70% worse than the previous year. In our first 3 months, we managed to bring this right down, including almost matching the September YoY results.

You might be wondering why we’re showing us delivering a worse YoY for October 2023. We were a bit concerned about this too, but then realised the account spent nearly 50% less in October 2022, meaning such a high ROAS was much easier to achieve.

Against the other countries

As the client shares data on the performance of other countries’ accounts, we also have another avenue to benchmark ourselves against. Before we took over, the UK account was consistently at the bottom of the pile.

After us taking over, we’ve catapulted the UK account into the top 3. And to top it off, in October 2023, we were number 1, besting Switzerland and Sweden (2 of the evergreen top performing countries).

Client confidence

One of the most important results we’ve achieved is less about the numbers and more about client agency relationship. It’s the fact that the client feels much more confident working with our agency compared to the previous agency. Hearing this was music to our ears as we endeavour to be a valued extension of our client’s marketing team.

Earlier this year we decided to move the Google Ads management from in-house to working with in-country agencies. This led to us hiring a UK based marketing agency to run the account but rather than improve results, we saw them severely worsen. We quickly decided to change to another agency, although we were sceptical after our recent experience and therefore ensured we were thorough when assessing new agencies.

After considering a few agencies, we decided to start with Repeat Digital and have been impressed by how quickly they’ve improved the account and achieved our ROAS targets.

What has really impressed us is their level of communication but also their ambition to outperform the results achieved by other agencies in other countries. This competitive nature has really helped us to hit the targets that have been set.

Thanks very much guys, looking forward to continuing to work with you.

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