E-commerce marketing that pays into your margin
In online retail everything is measurable, and that is exactly the trap. Most shops steer by metrics that look good and say nothing about profit. Revenue rises, margin falls, and at the end of the year the money is missing.
We steer differently. Instead of the ROAS of a campaign we look at contribution margin per product group, at the value of returning customers, and at which channel actually brings new demand.
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Why online shops follow their own rules
Measurability is no substitute for doing the maths
No other channel produces as many numbers as online retail, and in hardly any other are so many wrong conclusions drawn from them. A high ROAS often only means existing customers bought again who would have come anyway.
On top of that come particularities that exist nowhere else: the product feed decides half of all visibility, the season shifts every metric, returns eat margin, and a single stock shortage can devalue an entire campaign week.
The product feed is half the battle
In shopping ads and product search it is not the campaign structure that decides but the feed. Titles, category, attributes and images determine which searches a product appears for at all.
So we start with the feed, not with the campaign. A clean feed raises visibility and click rate at the same time and works in every channel that uses product data, including the new AI shopping assistants.
New customers and repeat purchase belong in the same calculation
How much a new customer may cost can only be answered if you know what they bring over time. Shops that look only at the first purchase systematically bid too low and lose growth to competitors who keep calculating.
So we separate new customer and existing customer channels cleanly, measure both separately and steer budget by what actually brings new demand.
What we do for online shops
01 / Product feed and Merchant Center
Title structure, categories, attributes, images and availability. We clean the feed up and keep it clean, because visibility in shopping, in product search and increasingly in AI shopping assistants depends on it. Delivery through our Google Shopping agency.
02 / Campaigns with contribution margin logic
Search, shopping and Performance Max, steered by margin per product group instead of a flat ROAS target. Products with thin margin get less budget even if they sell well.
03 / Organic visibility for categories
Category pages carry organic visibility in online retail, not individual products. We build them out so they rank for the searches that come before the product decision.
04 / Shop optimisation and conversion
Load time, filter logic, product presentation, shipping information and checkout. The biggest losses rarely happen in the campaign and almost always between product page and checkout.
05 / Existing customers and repeat purchase
Email, segments and occasions instead of mass mailings. The second purchase is far cheaper than the first, and it decides how much a new customer may cost. Delivery with our email marketing agency.
06 / Season and range planning
In retail the season shifts every metric. We plan budgets, stock and campaigns along the annual cycle, so reach is not missing in the most important quarter and budget is not burnt in the weakest.
We do the maths with you, not just the marketing
In retail, marketing needs access to numbers that usually sit in controlling: purchase prices, return rates, shipping costs, repeat purchase rates. Without them no channel can be assessed honestly.
We ask for those numbers at the start and calculate with them. It is unfamiliar and the only way to align marketing decisions with profit instead of revenue.
Transparent steering
Each month you receive an overview placing revenue, margin, new customer share and cost per new customer side by side, plus the recommendation for the next four weeks.
If a product group contributes nothing despite good sales figures, it says so there. Even when the campaign behind it looks excellent in the interface.
What online shops get out of it
Steering on profit
Visibility in product search
More genuine new customers
Higher customer value
Fewer losses at checkout
A planned season
Did it click?
Send us your range and your rough margins. We will tell you which product groups deserve budget, which do not, and where in the shop most purchases are lost.
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What is a good ROAS target?
That cannot be answered in general, because ROAS does not know your margin. A value of 4 can be excellent at 60 percent gross margin and a loss-making business at 15 percent. What makes sense is a target per product group, derived from the actual margin after returns and shipping.
Why is the product feed so important?
Because it decides which searches a product appears for at all. Title, category and attributes work in shopping ads, in organic product search and increasingly in AI shopping assistants that draw their recommendations from structured product data. An unclean feed costs visibility in all three channels at once.
Is SEO worth it for an online shop?
Yes, especially for category pages. The searches before the product decision, meaning categories, comparisons and guide questions, are organically reachable and deliver visitors who have not yet settled on a provider. Optimising individual product pages organically only pays off for very specific articles.
How do you handle returns in campaign steering?
They belong in the target. A product group with a 40 percent return rate tolerates a completely different cost-revenue ratio than one with 5 percent. Ignoring returns means systematically bidding too aggressively on the groups that come back the most.
What about Performance Max?
The campaign type works with a good data basis but gives little insight into where the budget lands. We use it when there are enough conversions and flank it with exclusions and separate campaigns for brand and new customer queries, so it does not collect demand that would have come anyway.
Which shop systems do you work with?
Among others Shopify, Shopware and WooCommerce. For marketing steering the system is secondary, what matters is clean product data and reliable tracking.
