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Taking Germany’s leading golf retailer All4Golf into 19 new European markets meant more than simply switching on campaigns in new countries. smec helped build demand, reach the right customers and put All4Golf’s business data at the heart of its advertising. The result: 140% more conversions and 154% more revenue. Google has now recognized this work with its 2026 International Growth Award for the EMEA region.
Smarter Ecommerce (smec) has won the Google Ads Impact Award 2026 in the International Growth category for the EMEA region. Google presented the award to smec’s agency team on 10 November at its European headquarters in Dublin. The award recognizes smec’s work with golf retailer All4Golf, where the teams developed a connected full-funnel strategy combining Demand Gen, AI Max and Performance Max with All4Golf’s own business data.
The Google Ads Impact Awards recognize advertisers and agencies that use Google Ads to deliver meaningful business results. The International Growth category highlights work that helps businesses enter new markets and grow beyond their home countries. Entries are judged on business impact, the use of Google’s AI, product expertise and campaign measurement.
“This award recognizes what an agency should deliver: growth a business can see in its own numbers,” says Marcel Verhofnik, Managing Director and Agency Lead at smec.
All4Golf didn’t just need more traffic in 19 new markets. It needed demand built where the brand was new, and a budget that follows margins, not clicks. Our team planned and ran exactly that, from the first Demand Gen impression to the final Performance Max conversion. Thank you to All4Golf for trusting us with their expansion.
Marcel Verhofnik, Managing Director and Agency Lead at smec
Table of Contents
The challenge:
growing across 19 markets
All4Golf had built a strong position in Germany and wanted to become Europe’s leading online golf destination. Expanding into new countries offered significant potential, but also came with four challenges:
- Reaching customers before they start searching. The existing setup focused mainly on capturing existing search demand. In new markets, All4Golf first needed to introduce its brand and products to potential customers.
- Campaigns didn’t know what was profitable. Important business data, such as product margins, pricing and profitability, remained in All4Golf’s internal systems instead of influencing advertising decisions.
- Manual work didn’t scale. Every new country brought its own feed, prices and competitors. Rebuilding segmentation and campaign structure by hand for each market was slow and error-prone.
- Average ROAS hid the real picture. With one target ROAS per campaign, star products were capped as soon as the target was hit, while weak products hid behind the bestsellers and kept drawing budget.
The approach: one connected funnel, steered by business data
Where to grow. Using Google’s International Growth Advisory Program and Market Explorer data, smec ranked markets by economic strength, disposable income and search volume for golf equipment. The result was a two-phase rollout: ten priority markets first, including Sweden, France and the Netherlands, followed by nine emerging markets.
A full funnel, not just the bottom of it. smec turned a performance-led setup into a connected full-funnel strategy that creates new demand, nurtures it and converts it, in every market:
- Upper funnel: Demand Gen builds demand before anyone searches, with product visuals on YouTube, Discover and Gmail, timed to seasonal promotions.
- Mid funnel: Demand Gen and AI Max keep that interest going as shoppers start to compare, with AI Max surfacing relevant search queries that weren’t covered before.
- Lower funnel: Performance Max and AI Max convert high-value customers with optimized feeds and creative, while localized brand search protects All4Golf against local competitors from day one.
Business-driven, not platform-driven. Every stage of the funnel is steered by the same business signals. smec injected All4Golf’s first-party business data, margin above all, into the campaigns through the smec Campaign Orchestrator, smec’s own software layer above the ad platforms. SmartScoreAI scores every product in every market daily, and Dynamic Segments move each product into the campaign that matches its potential. High performers and strategically important products get more budget, weak performers get less. What works in one market carries straight into the next, while seasonality, local product performance and promotions are still reflected market by market.
Google’s AI is very good at finding customers. Our job was to tell it which products matter most to All4Golf’s business. That is how Demand Gen, AI Max and Performance Max worked as one funnel across 19 markets, all steered by the same business goals.
Christian Scharmüller, CCO and Managing Director at smec
Software where scale wins, specialists where judgment wins. smec’s agency team planned the market rollout, built and ran the full-funnel campaign architecture, and worked with All4Golf’s team to bring its business data into the campaigns. The smec Campaign Orchestrator took over the work that doesn’t scale by hand: scoring and re-segmenting more than 20,000 products across 19 markets, every day. That kept the specialists’ time on strategy and market decisions.
The results
- Reach: +232% more impressions across all markets
- Engagement: +233% more clicks and a 26% increase in click-through rate
- Business results: +140% more conversions, +154% more revenue and +5% higher average order value
- Scale: 20,000+ products continuously evaluated and re-segmented across 19 markets, without adding headcount
“Smarter Ecommerce has taken our Google Ads management to a completely new level,” says Norman Wendel, Teamlead Paid Marketing & Pricing at All4Golf.
We are particularly impressed by the AI-supported optimization based on real business metrics like POAS, CLV, and margin — instead of just focusing on pure ROAS. smec incorporates our real margins, return rates, and CLV data into the control, so we invest our advertising budget in the products that truly let us grow profitably, instead of low-margin bestsellers.
Norman Wendel, Teamlead Paid Marketing & Pricing at All4Golf
About smec
smec helps brands and retailers turn paid media into profitable growth, online and in store. We combine independent measurement, proprietary technology and deep retail expertise in one partnership, from deciding where to invest to executing campaigns across channels.
By combining Tracking and Analytics, Marketing Mix Modeling and Experimentation, we give marketing teams a reliable view of what each channel really contributes. We turn these insights into action with our own software, an independent strategic layer outside the ad platforms that steers every campaign by business goals, so spend goes to what grows the business profitably.
Everything is built on paid media experience across ecommerce and retail since 2007. One team aligns the full funnel across search, social, display and programmatic, using shared signals and consistent measurement to connect every channel to the same business goals.
Today, smec manages more than €620 million in annual ad spend for over 300 brands and retailers, including THG, Snipes, REWE and Decathlon.
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