Every month, several thousand dollars went on ads for products that were out of stock.
When a product has run out, the money spent on its ad brings no buyer.
| Automating the advertising of several thousand products | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Getting product data into the campaigns | 5 scripts, one after another, half an hour | 1 run - one press of a button |
| Ads for featured products out of stock | kept running | checked every half hour, stopped |
| Wasted ad spend | several thousand dollars a month | several thousand dollars saved |
The ad that does not know the shelf is empty
A shop assistant does not recommend a product that is not on the shelf. An ad does, if nobody tells it.
At Misco exactly this happened, with several thousand products.
How big the company was
Misco sold computer products and accessories in several European countries, to companies, schools, public institutions and private buyers. It was the European brand of Systemax, an American group. The public figures:
- Systemax's turnover in Europe, the Middle East and Africa was USD 1.05 billion in 2015.
- In Europe it sold in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland, among others.
- In 2013 it opened a service centre in Budapest, where 215 people worked in 2014.
The company no longer works in this form: Systemax sold the European business in 2017, and the British Misco became insolvent in the same year.
One run instead of five scripts
My main task was managing the ads.
The product feed was not fully automated. (The product feed is the list in which a webshop hands Google the data of its products: their names, their prices, and whether they are available.) Several pieces of data had to be put into the campaigns by a program.
There were several thousand products. The developer who tried before me solved it so that five scripts had to be run one after another, each one building on the one before. (A script is a short program that does one job.)
I rewrote his solution. The new system handled everything in a single run.
With this we gained something that could not have been done by hand. Managing the data of several thousand products manually simply does not work. And after the changes, one press of a button was enough to run it, instead of half an hour. The rest happened in the background.
The product ran out, the ad kept running
We ran the products in two kinds of ads.
One is Google Shopping, the product results with pictures. These work from the product feed, and the feed shows whether a product is available. When something runs out, its ad stops at once.
The other is the search campaign, the text ad among the search results. The featured products appeared here too, and for them this was not true. These ads kept running even when the product was out of stock.
This meant several thousand dollars, continuously, every month. It went on ads that had no point at all at that moment.
Every half hour, on its own
I built an automation that watched the availability of the products. It ran on its own every half hour, and when a product was no longer available, it stopped its ads.
This was still not the perfect solution. It was what the technology and the tools of the time allowed.
Even so, it led to several thousand dollars of marketing spend saved.