PPC campaigns are an essential ad strategy for any beauty brand and can be immensely rewarding – when it's done right, and with the right partner.

In 2024, THG Commerce needed a PPC partner that could bring control, granularity and performance to its PPC campaigns through intelligent automation.

For THG Commerce, that partner was Smarter Ecommerce (smec) – smart software amplified with expert services, designed to optimize ad spend for enhanced performance. Here’s how we did it. 

The challenges

THG Commerce manages multiple stores, stores with their own unique targets. As a result, we have to constantly recalibrate our ad strategies – a time-intense process that requires a lot of work and expertise.

Having adopted Google’s Performance Max (PMax) product, we began facing challenges with effectively segmenting our stock-keeping units (SKUs).

Condensing all our products across brands condensed into a single PMax campaign led to increased inefficiencies, wasted budget, and an inability to drive the efficient growth we needed with our PPC campaigns.

As a result, we missed key growth goals and spent a significant amount of time on manual work, trying to streamline and make more efficient our PMax campaign.

We needed a solution that offered intelligent product segmentation that allowed us to flexibly weight our data inputs – delivering full control over segmentation that truly aligned to our business goals. 

The solutions

In 2024, we partnered with smec to enhance our PMax strategies, leveraging its AI-powered software solution for Performance Max to bring granular control over our campaigns.

smec provides intelligent software coupled with expert services to align PPC strategies with core business objectives. The smec platform provides room for human control to guide the AI with strategic inputs, all supported by comprehensive insights that put THG Commerce in the driving seat for our PPC ads.

smec enabled us to separate and classify our SKUs into strategically aligned segments. This allowed us to identify products aligned with each brand's distinct objectives which, in turn, empowered us to funnel spend to those SKUs with the highest financial potential.

In partnership with smec, our strategy pivoted on three core elements:

• Multi-dimensional product segmentation: classifying products by key metrics that correspond to business objectives, leveraging business insights to identifying SKUs with profitability potential, and crafting more intentional, goal-led campaigns.
• Automated campaign generation: by applying predictive AI models, smec enables real-time updates to budgets and ROAS targets, maximizing efficiency and minimizing manual input.
• Impactful performance insights: total control over software means we can fine-tune our campaigns, monitoring actual performance in real-time. This was supported and enhanced by smec’s on-hand expertise for competition insights, strategic decisions, benchmark reports and more. 

The results

“Our partnership with smec has been immensely transformative for our PPC ad campaigns. The fantastic bottom-line results of our campaigns are testament to the cumulative power of the detailed segmentation, total user control and powerful automation afforded by smec’s Performance Max Optimization solution.”  – Richard Ward – CEO, THG Ingenuity

As a result of implementing smec’s new tiering structure for LOOKFANTASTIC, we achieved an impressive +39% revenue uplift in Germany, demonstrating the strong impact of our approach in this key market. As we continue to scale across the EU and globally, there remains significant potential for further revenue uplift.

Buoyed by the success of smec’s solution for LOOKFANTASTIC, we also launched across our other beauty brands, Dermstore and Cult Beauty, with +19% and +42% revenue uplift, respectively.

Alongside the tiering structure on Google, we’ve also started testing the smec solution on Microsoft, with the aim of helping the growth of percentage mix. Consequently, we've noticed some strong early results, with revenue up +60% YoY and spend down by -55% YoY, delivering a net cost of sale – back by -11% YoY.