From £10k to £35k:
Scaling an Outdoor Retailer on Google Shopping

The Kånken Challenge: Rebalancing Budget Allocation

The Fjällräven Kånken was the retailer's best-known product line and, at the start of the engagement, was consuming approximately 70% of total paid search budget. Demand was genuine and consistent, driven largely by a younger consumer audience for whom the Kånken had become a school and lifestyle staple. The problem was pricing: the market for Kånken bags is highly competitive, with multiple authorised retailers stocking the same SKUs at identical or near-identical price points. That left margin under pressure and limited how efficiently the budget could perform.

The approach was to establish the right ceiling for the Kånken range and redirect the freed budget towards higher-margin product categories across the wider catalogue. Rather than cutting the Kånken out of the account, bids and budgets were restructured to reflect its true value contribution. This allowed the account to scale total spend from £10k to £35k per month without simply pouring more money into a category where margin was thin.

Reviews as a Competitive Differentiator

For a retailer competing on Google Shopping with a catalogue that overlaps significantly with other stockists, price is rarely the only lever. When multiple merchants are listing the same product at a similar price point, the visible trust signals in the Shopping listing become the differentiator. Product star ratings and store review scores directly influence click-through rates, and for competitive lines like the Kånken, a higher rating can be the reason a shopper clicks one listing over another.

Review strategy was treated as a core channel priority. This meant ensuring post-purchase review request flows were active, that review feeds were correctly integrated with Google Merchant Center, and that any negative feedback was responded to promptly. Product-level reviews were also monitored, with attention paid to ensuring that high-volume SKUs maintained strong scores and that any product data issues affecting review display were resolved quickly.

Feed Optimisation with Shoptimised

The product feed is the foundation of any Google Shopping account. Google uses it to determine which searches a product is eligible to appear for, how it is categorised, and how relevant it is to any given query. A feed built on auto-generated CMS titles and incomplete attribute data will consistently underperform, regardless of how well the bidding strategy is structured.

Shoptimised, a specialist feed management platform, was used to build custom product titles and descriptions for priority SKUs. Each title was constructed to lead with the attributes most relevant to how shoppers search: brand, product type, key features, colour, and size. Google product categories were reviewed and corrected where necessary, GTINs were validated, and additional attributes, including material, age group, and gender, were populated where the data supported it.

The impact of feed quality shows up in multiple places simultaneously. Better title relevance improves the match between a search query and the product listing, which lowers CPC through improved quality signals. More accurate categorisation broadens eligibility across Shopping surfaces. And complete attribute data reduces the risk of product disapprovals that quietly remove high-performing SKUs from inventory.

CSS Delivery for CPC Efficiency

Standard Google Shopping ads are delivered through Google's own Comparison Shopping Service. Built into every click is a margin that Google retains as the CSS provider. Third-party Comparison Shopping Services are authorised by Google to deliver Shopping ads to the same placements, but without that built-in margin. The result is a structural CPC advantage that applies to every click delivered through the CSS.

For this account, campaigns were migrated to a third-party CSS, delivering an average CPC saving of 10 to 15 percent across the account. On a spend base of £35k per month, that efficiency saving is meaningful: it translates directly into more budget available for higher-priority campaigns, without any increase in the client's overall cost base.

The saving was reinvested rather than returned. Budget that would otherwise have been consumed by Google's CSS margin was redirected towards the higher-margin product categories identified through the budget rebalancing work, compounding the efficiency gain across the account.

Exceeding the Target, Improving the Foundation

The client came to the engagement with a clear goal: reach £30k per month in managed paid search spend. That target was surpassed, with the account reaching a peak of £35k per month. The growth was not achieved by simply increasing bids across the board. Each of the four workstreams, budget allocation, review management, feed quality, and CSS delivery, contributed a distinct layer of structural improvement that made scaling viable.

The Kånken's dominance of the budget was brought under control, freeing spend for higher-margin categories. Review scores were actively managed, improving click-through rates on competitive listings. The Shoptimised feed build gave every campaign a higher-quality foundation to operate from. And the CSS migration delivered a 10 to 15 percent CPC reduction that was reinvested into campaign performance rather than absorbed as a cost.

The sum of those changes was an account that was not just bigger, but structurally sounder. The spend increase was accompanied by improvements in the quality of how that spend was being allocated, making each pound more productive than the last.