Mærkbare is a Copenhagen-based retailer specializing in barefoot and minimalist footwear for women, men, and children. With two physical stores – including Denmark’s only Vivobarefoot Concept Store – and a growing e-commerce presence, they bring the barefoot philosophy to a wide audience in Denmark.

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Note: These results represent one business’s journey. Every brand is different, and while this framework has delivered strong outcomes, performance will always depend on factors unique to each business.

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The Challenge: ‍

When I began the partnership, Mærkbare's marketing mix was heavily weighted towards Meta Ads, which served as their leading advertisement channel and consumed the majority of their ad spend.

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When I first entered the Google Ads account, it was clear that the current setup didn’t support the overall business goal, nor did it support the larger product catalog of different products and brands. The setup was heavily reliant on Google’s automated AI products, with very little control in spend allocation, which made it very hard to scale their Google Ads revenue. There had been some attempts in scaling to new markets, but the results were only an extremely high CPA (+€140) and a low ROAS (<1,5x) after north of €5500 in ad spend. 

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Almost all campaigns were [Limited By Budget] and the account-wide ROAS they achieved was huge – like in the 12x - 26x range – which was a product of the high target ROAS settings. High ROAS is for sure positive, but it can easily become a comfort zone that hinders growth. Mærkbare was ready to grow, so this mindset had to change.

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Finally, their Google Ads account was relying on imported GA4 conversion goals. This limited Google Ads ability to optimize Smart Bidding signals effectively, since GA4 imported conversion goals don’t provide the same level of granular, real-time data as native Google Ads tags.

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No fundamentals in place or a real strategy implemented.

The Solution: 

First and foremost we made sure to implement profitmetrics in order to closely monitor gross profit down to a campaign level when growing, as we neded to rethink and increase our bids inside Google Ads (lowering tROAS) in order to capture more and more sales volume to support the business growth.

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Then i started the full rebuild of Mærkbare’s Google Ads engine, which involved: 

• New native Google Ads tracking setup (later server-side)
• Rebuild the shopping feed (Their back-end setup was stellar, which we needed to sync to our product feed as well) 
• Implementation of standard shopping campaigns 
• Restructure of brand vs. non-brand campaigns 
• Better search structure with included dynamic search ads to capture those long-tail search queries.
• Adding appropriate bidding strategies to brand vs. non-brand campaigns that ensured the control needed in spend across each area
• Better ad spend allocation towards brands with larger margins and demand. 

• All the nitty griddy things such as improving ad copies, align keywords with landing pages, adding fresh 1st party customer data etc. 

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All of the above is segmented into 3 phases: 

• Phase 1 is always a foundation rebuild (shopping feeds, tracking, 1st party customer data upload etc) 
• Phase 2 is always a campaign structure overhaul (where campaigns gets segmented to align business goals) 
• Phase 3 is always scale & optimize (increasing budgets, managing targets, keeping campaigns from being limited by budget etc)

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This order ensures the fundamentals are solid before restructuring campaigns, and that a clear campaign structure exists before scaling and optimizing.

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It’s a repeatable framework that has driven the results shown below. 

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