Dr. Martens

In an era of rising operational costs and retail volatility, the “more is more” approach to digital advertising is a dangerous game, and that was true for Dr. Martens’ campaigns. They were driving sales, but those sales didn’t always reflect the brand’s true margin tiers.

Standard category-based segmentation was blind to the actual profitability of individual SKUs. This meant the algorithm was potentially over-investing in low-margin products just to hit volume targets, while high-margin products were left under-supported. 

The mission was clear: Align paid media investment with the brand’s business economics to ensure every dollar spent was working toward the bottom line, not just the top.

To solve this, we re-engineered the account by developing a three-tier Performance Max framework organized into high-, medium-, and low-margin product groups.

• Profit-first infrastructure: We automated margin data uploads into Google Merchant Center, ensuring Google’s AI always had up-to-date profitability information to make bidding decisions.
• The equal-target test: We assigned identical ROAS targets across all tiered segments. This gave the algorithm the freedom to naturally migrate spend toward the SKUs with the greatest profitability potential without being restricted by different efficiency goals.
• Mid-campaign pivot: It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Early on, our Low Margin campaign was outperforming “Medium Margin” in Average Order Value (AOV) because the iconic boots asset group was sitting in the wrong tier. We didn’t wait for the post-mortem; we course-corrected in real time by enhancing search themes and boosting the boots asset group to the Medium tier to reclaim that value.