+27% revenue, +33% average order value — at the same Google Ads budget.

The starting point: harder economics outside Germany

Selling gabions across Europe sounds straightforward until you look at the operational reality. Multilingual website resources were limited — most product depth lived only in German. Shipping out of Germany into other European countries was slower and more expensive than what modern buyers expect. Trusted Shops, a meaningful trust signal in this category, was only implemented on the home market. Promotional offers also only ran in Germany.

None of these were ours to fix. So the brief was different: with the same budget as the year before, lift revenue and average order value in the markets we did run — using Google Ads strategy alone.

The two levers: Google Shopping and dynamic remarketing

We made an early call to concentrate on two channels rather than spread the budget thin across the whole Google estate. Shopping for new demand. Dynamic remarketing for the buyers Shopping had already introduced to the brand. Search picked up the gap in between.

Google Shopping — the primary revenue driver

Smart Shopping was the workhorse. We worked closely with the brand to identify the product lines and category-level opportunities that justified the heaviest budget allocation — not by gut feel, but by structured market research into where the cross-border demand actually was. Targeted bidding was layered onto profitable product segments so the algorithm wasn’t spending equally across the catalogue.

Dynamic remarketing — closing the gap

Gabions are not an impulse purchase. The deliberation cycle is long, the basket is large, and most buyers come back to the site multiple times before they decide. Dynamic remarketing gave us the touch-points to bring those returning buyers back to the exact products they’d already viewed — not generic brand creative, the actual SKU. That is where the AOV lift came from.

Audience strategy: built on real user behaviour

To get display remarketing to actually pay back, we built customer lists inside Google Analytics that mapped to where each user was in the decision cycle, not just “visited the site in the last 30 days”. Then we used the market research to position remarketing creative at the moments along the user journey where intent was rising.

The goal was straightforward: maximise touch-points without burning frequency. Keep prospects in the journey as long as possible. Hand them off to Shopping when they were ready to close.

The result: more buying, larger baskets, same spend

Across the year, with no increase in budget, the work delivered three things that compound:

• +79% clicks YoY — the structural Shopping and bidding work made each euro reach noticeably more buyers.
• +27% revenue YoY — the additional clicks weren’t cheap traffic; they converted.
• +33% average order value YoY — remarketing did its job. People came back, bought more per order, and the deliberation cycle stopped being a leak.

For a category where the home market gets the website, the offers and the trust signals, that is what good Google Ads execution can do for the markets that don’t.