Homebase sells over 30,000 unique products, with more added on a regular basis. This presented a challenge for the Havas team as it made it impossible to achieve the desired efficiency levels manually. Solutions like scripts were tested, but ultimately did not save the team time or significantly improve performance, leading the team to turn to Squared.io.
The Add Queries tool enabled the team to quickly and efficiently control the vast number of unique queries, with insights and automations ensuring best practice was observed. Shopping feed health was also analysed, providing the team with a quick diagnosis of any issues. These features from Squared.io resulted in significant performance gains:
Homebase are home and garden experts, helping it’s customers with gardening, decorating, repairing and home furnishing as well as kitchens, bathrooms and fitted bedrooms. With over 30,000 products for sale, Havas knew improving performance whilst also maintaining best practice across multiple Google Ads accounts would require a great deal of manual work and time, both from a shopping and search perspective. Homebase also received budgets from different suppliers, so ensuring traffic was directed to the correct product was critical. Havas knew an automated solution was needed. Initially, the team leaned on automated shopping campaigns and the use of scripts, which should have reduced time spent on manual input and improved performance. However, both of these presented their own issues. With Smart Shopping, the feed became more critical but the team had limited insight into this. Scripts take a long time to set up, maintain and edit, and can become nuanced, making it difficult for multiple members of the team to help. Consequently, the team needed a way to bring clarity and action to the Homebase accounts to help ensure performance remained high.
Dealing with the sheer volume of queries from the number of products Homebase sell would be virtually impossible manually. However, using Squared.io’s Add Queries tool, search terms are automatically analyzed and prioritized. This allows the team to action them with a single click, saving time, which in turn means more queries can be resolved. The scale of the Homebase accounts also means that maintaining best practice can be time consuming, but with the insights and automations provided by Squared.io, this can be done with minimal manual analysis and actions by Havas. The Routing negatives automation ensures that the budget from specific suppliers are spent on the right traffic, meaning Havas can accurately assign the budgets of their suppliers to their products. Squared.io’s shopping specific penalties helped Havas better understand their feed by automatically highlighting certain key insights. Product errors, demotions and disapprovals in the feed and how to fix them were flagged, as well as products going out of stock or leaving the feed, ensuring significant swings in traffic can be understood. Squared.io also highlights when a product isn’t categorized, which makes it harder for Google to match a product to a potential customer, therefore causing less relevant traffic to be generated which lowers efficiency metrics. Squared.io also helps with shopping performance once in Google Ads. Any products serving impressions but no clicks are highlighted, as there is likely feed items that need optimizing in order to drive traffic. Product groups not generating conversions or with a high bounce rate are also flagged, as these can highlight an issue with the customer journey onsite.
Utilizing Squared.io’s insights, automations and integrated reports resulted in a considerable improvement, with a direct effect on performance metrics as well as saving time that could be reinvested elsewhere in the account. Generic search CPC’s fell 14% and ROAS improved 48%, with generic traffic making up 80% of the traffic v 60% previously. Shopping CPC’s fell 35% and ROAS improved 67%.
“The automation that Squared.io provides has made a significant impact across the team. The account performance and efficiencies have improved considerably and we’re able to reinvest time in more impactful work for Homebase.”
Katie Millwaters
Performance Business Director
Havas