The challenge
One of Turkey’s leading home and kitchenware brands, Karaca struggled to gain traction in the UK’s crowded ecommerce market. After two years, growth stalled despite strong products and clear performance targets: 25% revenue uplift on a budget capped at 15% of annual ad spend. Their initial Standard Shopping setup lumped every product together, wasted budget on out-of-stock and low-value items, and left long-tail SKUs buried in Google’s pantry. So they needed structure, strategy, and real control over their campaigns.
The solution
With the help of smec’s software solution, Karaca overhauled their approach, moving to a three-pronged Performance Max framework:
- Closing the data gap: They fed PMax with item-level, first-party signals like stock availability, price changes, and product attributes like margin, seasonality, or strategic importance, to power campaigns on real-time business data.
- Setting product goals: Using smec’s Product Goals feature, they grouped and prioritized items by objectives: seasonal events, bundle promotions, inventory status, and a custom “Red Label” for high-priority SKUs. So ad spend mirrored their merchandising strategy.
- Multi-dimensional campaign setup: They rebuilt PMax into three dedicated campaigns: Product Goal (to surface long-tail and promotional lines), Brand-only (to isolate brand lift), and Performance (to scale proven winners), ensuring each has a clear job and budget aligned with business priorities.
The results
Under this strategic glow-up, Karaca’s catalog became far more efficient: they cut non-converting SKUs by 47%, shifted spend toward high-return products, and saw a year-on-year revenue increase of +56% alongside +18% profit growth - all while hitting +31% ROAS on an airtight budget.
More than ROI
On top of those results Karaca also got more:
- Real-time visibility & proactivity: smec’s platform pulled back the curtain on PMax’s “black box”, feeding inventory and price changes straight into their campaigns. That let Karaca shift from reactive tweaks to proactive optimisation, stopping wasted spend on out-of-stock items and surfacing high-potential offers the moment they mattered.
- Upskilled in-house expertise: Beyond the tech, smec’s PPC team worked side-by-side with Karaca to interpret granular conversion and cost/revenue data. That guidance unlocked new strategies, like strategically pushing long-tail SKUs that had been invisible before, which resulted in Karaca reducing the number of products that don’t convert by 47%!
- Scalable, data-driven framework & brand lift: They didn’t just hit their numbers; Karaca gained a repeatable, scalable ad architecture. it gave them deep performance control, slashed inefficiencies and, via a dedicated brand campaign, finally let them measure and grow UK brand lift with confidence.
- Turning volatility into advantage: By integrating live stock-level signals, they flipped market swings, like Ramadan rushes, from risks into strategic upsides, driving sharper, more profitable bidding in peak periods.
