PPC campaigns are a vital strategy for any beauty brand and can deliver huge rewards – when done right, and with the right partner.

In 2024, THG Commerce set out to find a partner that could provide superior control, granularity, and performance for its PPC campaigns using intelligent automation. For THG Commerce, that partner was Smarter Ecommerce (smec), whose smart software and expert services work together to optimize ad spend for enhanced performance. Here’s how we did it. 

The Challenges

THG Commerce manages multiple stores, each with unique targets. This required us to constantly recalibrate our ad strategies – a time-intense process demanding significant work and expertise.

After adopting Google’s Performance Max (PMax), we faced challenges with effectively segmenting our stock-keeping units (SKUs).

Grouping all our products across various brands into a single PMax campaign led to inefficiencies, wasted budget, and an inability to drive the efficient growth we needed.

As a result, we missed key growth goals and spent countless hours on manual work, trying to streamline our PMax campaigns.

We needed a solution that offered intelligent product segmentation and the flexibility to weight our data inputs, giving us full control to align our campaigns with our business goals. 
 

The Solutions

In 2024, we partnered with smec to elevate our PMax strategies, using its AI-powered solution to gain granular control over our campaigns.

smec provides intelligent software coupled with expert services to align PPC strategies with core business objectives. The platform allows for human oversight to guide the AI with strategic inputs, all supported by comprehensive insights that put THG Commerce in the driving seat of 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 the SKUs with the highest financial potential.

Our partnership strategy with smec, focused on three core elements:

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

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

By 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 growth.

Building on this success, we rolled out the solution across our other beauty brands, Dermstore and Cult Beauty, achieving +19% and +42% revenue uplift, respectively.

Alongside the tiering structure on Google, we have also started testing the smec solution on Microsoft to help grow our channel mix. We've seen strong early results, with revenue up +60% YoY and spend down by -55% YoY, improving our net cost of sale by 11% YoY.