Game, set, match with AI

Challenge

Tennis Point is one of Europe’s leading racquet sports retailers — thousands of SKUs from Adidas, ASICS, Wilson, and PUMA, managed by a one-person marketing team. When Jonas Koslik adopted PMax to scale across Europe, the manual burden became unsustainable fast. Growing without adding headcount meant solving three fundamental problems:

1. Data starvation: Their catalog had thousands of SKUs, but PMax only pushed proven bestsellers. Products without strong history never got impressions — so they never built one. Most of the catalog stayed permanently invisible.
2. Static campaigns: Campaign structure, tROAS, and budgets stayed fixed, disconnected from Tennis Point’s actual business goals. PMax decided what to prioritize, not Jonas. Performance stalled and scaling felt out of reach.
3. Zero visibility: Campaigns ran on Google’s defaults with no window into why performance stalled or where to intervene. Without transparency, every decision was a guess.

Solution

To break through the scaling wall, Tennis Point had to stop playing defense to Google’s automation. By partnering with smec and deploying the Campaign Orchestrator, Jonas transformed from a manual campaign executor into a true AI Orchestrator — translating business objectives into machine-readable parameters that made PMax work for Tennis Point, not the other way around.

The approach followed a definitive 3-step framework:

1. Mastering the data: smec’s SmartScoreAI predicted the true potential of data-starved products by comparing their attributes with stronger-performing items — brand, category, seasonal demand, price. The “Neighborhood Effect” feature gave overlooked SKUs a fair shot: every product received a score, including former zombie products that PMax had been ignoring. Suddenly they had the context they needed to compete, unlocking incremental revenue from a catalog that was always there, just never seen.

2. Optimizing the inputs: Products were grouped into four priority tiers based on SmartScoreAI scores. As scores shifted, the Campaign Orchestrator moved products between campaigns automatically — ad spend always followed the momentum.

   Automated tROAS and budget recommendations directed spend toward the highest-return opportunities across the full account. With Auto-Apply enabled, optimal tROAS and budget changes pushed directly into Google Ads autonomously — while Jonas retained full override control at any time.

3. Controlling the outputs: PMax is designed to keep advertisers in the dark. Actionable Insights changed that — giving Jonas full visibility into what Google’s AI was doing and why. The Channel Report exposed where budget was being wasted. Brand vs Non-Brand separated incremental growth from conversions Tennis Point would have captured anyway. Segment Insights showed how each strategic tier was performing. Placement Insights flagged brand safety risks before damage was done.

Results

Winning the big score

One person. One playbook. Five markets. No new hires.

Italy

+90%

Revenue
YoY

Germany

+43%

ROAS
YoY

France

+42%

Conv. value
/ revenue

Nearly 4,000 products

Auto-evaluated and re-assigned every week.
Five country campaigns running in parallel. Zero additional headcount.

10+
hours

Reclaimed from manual tasks, every week

535
hours

Saved per year — almost 70 full workdays

smec's Campaign Orchestrator completely transformed how we manage paid search. The automated tROAS and budget recommendations alone saved us countless hours, but it was the massive revenue uptick that gave us the confidence we needed to expand across Europe.

Jonas Koslik Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Tennis Point