COMPETITING SMARTER: HOW VANDEN BORRE TURNED PRICE DATA INTO A MEDIA STRATEGY
Vanden Borre has always been a strong local player in Belgium’s e-commerce. At one point, it ranked #7 among the Top 40 Belgian e-commerce websites, and was the highest-ranked electronics retailer, just behind platforms like Telenet, 2dehands.be and Proximus.
But the landscape shifted dramatically. During the pandemic, pure online players like Bol.com and Amazon entered and rapidly expanded. With their scale and algorithmic pricing, they quickly gained ground. Vanden Borre could no longer rely on its long-standing “lowest price guarantee”, because staying the cheapest, at all times, was no longer feasible against the pure online players.
But here’s the nuance: Vanden Borre isn’t losing the price game, they’re just not winning it all the time. Just like competition, Vanden Borre adjusts prices multiple times a day. For certain products, they still offer a significant price advantage, just not consistently across the entire catalog. But when they do have the lowest price, they have a real edge. And for Vanden Borre to maintain their position in a highly competitive market, they need sales volume. So every time they offer the best price, they need to make it count.
The challenge was clear: how can we make sure Vanden Borre shows up exactly when they have a price advantage, and turn that into sales? So the real question became: how do we make that happen in our media strategy, and which data can actually power it?
SITTING ON A DATA GOLD MINE
We realized we already had the answer with our Google Merchant Center infrastructure. This platform includes real-time pricing benchmark data, which compares Vanden Borre’s product prices against the competition (including Amazon and Bol.com) and flags when they are the cheapest.
This insight allowed us to shift from asking “How do we compete?” to “How do we use this data to only compete when we can win?”. We will see it later, this strategy proved to be successful.
The next step was to define how to retrieve and use that data.
FROM INSIGHT TO ACTIVATION: BUILDING THE PIPELINE
We aligned on the media use case first: Shopping campaigns, which would deliver the highest impact, as they combine visibility and price exposure right on the SERP. The lower price will be the first thing customers see, even before Search Ads.
To activate this strategy, we needed to transform raw price data into a functional, campaign-ready Shopping feed. Here's how we did it:
- Data Source: we leveraged Google Merchant Center’s price competitiveness data, which benchmarks Vanden Borre’s prices against those of competitors and flags when a product is the cheapest on the market. This was our base insight.
- Data Extraction: using Funnel.io, we automated the extraction of this pricing signal and routed it directly into a live Google Sheet. This allowed us to monitor product-level competitiveness daily, without manual updates.
- Feed Enrichment: within the Google Sheet, we built a logic layer that created a YES/NO condition per product, depending on whether Vanden Borre was cheaper than its competitors.
- Feed Management & Labeling: we pushed this enriched feed into Channable, our feed management tool. There, we applied a Custom Label based on the YES/NO logic, dynamically tagging only the competitive products.
- Shopping Campaign Activation: finally, in Google Ads, we created a Shopping campaign that filtered exclusively on the “YES” label, meaning the campaign only showed products where Vanden Borre had a real pricing edge.
This pipeline runs automatically, updating the campaign structure based on live market conditions, with no manual monitoring needed.
RESULTS CONFIRMING THIS STRATEGY WORKS
By being present at the top of the Search page with our lowest price showing next to our peers. Even though the product list changes constantly, the results have been consistently strong. Our data-led targeting strategy has delivered:
- +33% CTR on products in the “competitive price” feed compared to standard campaigns
- +46% increase in CVR, showing stronger purchase intent
This strategy helps Vanden Borre defend its place in the market, not by fighting the giants on their terms, but by using data to put forward the competitive advantage it already has. With this strategy, we were able to prove that you can outsmart the competitors, instead of outspending them.
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Astrid Mérenne