The rush for gold
In a low-margin industry, online food delivery is crucial for retailer profitability. With Belgium’s market penetration 20% behind the Netherlands and the UK, the growth potential leads to fierce competition.
Therefore, Collect&Go, the online grocery shopping service by Colruyt Group, where customers can conveniently order groceries online and pick them up at a designated collection point, challenged Semetis with the following question: How can we optimize the synergies between SEO and SEA for maximum ROI efficiency?
PPC, efficient advertising or cannibalization tool?
SERP is the primary driver of sales for Collect&Go, leading them to allocate a significant part of their digital marketing budget to Search and Shopping (PPC) campaigns. Indeed, while SEO delivers high ROI, even strong organic rankings face visibility challenges due to the propensity of paid ads on some competitive queries.
This overlap between SEO and SEA can result in cannibalization, leading to wasteful spending and impacting profitability.
Building an automated budget management system optimizing SEO and SEA investments
Our challenges were clear:
- Prevent cannibalization by focusing our SEA budget on keywords that deliver incremental traffic
- Promote high-value pages that Google may under-prioritize in SEO or SEA
- Increase visibility for important new pages that aren’t sufficiently promoted by Google
We aimed for a dynamic real-time bidding strategy and budget management that can adjust PPC budgets based on organic search performance.
- We developed a tool that identifies pages with high business value but poor organic performance. Given that Collect&Go has more than 20,000 products, automation was essential. The tool pulled data from Google Search Console to find underperforming SEO pages, pages that had a rank lower than 5 and less than a thousand impressions.
- This automated list was linked to Google Ads via Dynamic Search Ads, offering two key benefits: ads only appear if the user’s query matches the content of the provided URLs, and ad copy is automatically generated based on website content.
- If a page no longer meets the business requirements, it disappears from the list and the campaign. If a page is added, a budget is allocated in real-time to boost its visibility.
- This system requires no manual setup, as it’s fully automated. The campaign optimizes itself, saving time and resources.
- By integrating SEO and SEA reporting, we can better evaluate which queries and URLs are driving the most traffic, paid or organic, and track how these proportions evolve over time.
It’s a win-win system if a page performs well in SEO, it won’t be pushed into SEA and the other way around.
This approach goes against Google’s automation-first best practices, emphasizing giving them full control to deliver the best performance. However, these recommendations don’t consider our SEO performances or the need to push specific high-value pages.
Decreasing cannibalization while performing 3x better
Our goal was to leverage technology and data to improve the cost-efficiency of our marketing budget… And it worked!
- Around 8400 High-value pages are put forward now
- The overlap between SEO and SEA is minimized
- The new Dynamic Search Ads campaign outperformed our other similar SEA efforts by having a ROAS 3 times better.
Lotte Vranckx
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