Barstools.co.uk is a furniture ecommerce brand in a very competitive category for paid advertising. When they partnered with us three years ago, they were facing the industry's biggest problem - the summer slump.

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Furniture sales typically tank when the sun comes out, making it difficult to maintain profitability during several months of the year. Their existing ad setup wasn't equipped to handle these seasonal challenges, let alone grow through them.

When Public Nectar teamed up with Barstools.co.uk three years back, they were facing a common headache for furniture brands - the summer slump.

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Everyone knows sales can tank when the sun's out, making it tough to keep profits up. Barstools.co.uk was just ticking along, and their ad setup wasn't ready to handle those slow times, let alone grow.

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When we first dug into their accounts, the problems were clear.

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Google Ads were a mess. The setup was tangled, and budget was being wasted on inefficient campaigns.

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Meta looked good on paper. It seemed healthy, but inflated view-through conversions hid the fact that actual performance was poor.

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Their ad structure couldn't handle increased spending, especially when market conditions got tough.

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They were celebrating metrics that didn't actually mean real growth.

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They didn't need small tweaks. They needed campaigns that could handle seasonal pressure and deliver real profitability, not just surface-level metrics.

We focused on two things - making their campaigns work harder during tough months and cutting through the inflated metrics to see real performance.

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Google - Starting Fresh

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We made Performance Max the main engine, feeding it all the customer data we had. But we didn't just ditch their old Standard Shopping campaigns. We rebuilt them to work hand-in-hand with the new setup.

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We launched focused campaigns with ad copy that actually got people to buy, used audience insights to show the right products to the right people, and created a system that caught customers no matter where they were in their buying journey. No more wasting budget on clicks that went nowhere.

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Meta - Real Performance, Real Results

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For Meta campaigns, we cut through the noise. We switched to a "Maximise Conversion Value" bidding strategy to go after the most valuable conversions.

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A big part of this was bringing in user-generated content, which really built trust. We tested everything - product pages versus collection pages, different ad creatives, different audiences.

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Most importantly, we stopped celebrating fake numbers. Only click-through conversions that led to actual sales counted.