How Gandalf achieved a 1316% ROAS and 100% overall higher revenues with Microsoft Advertising

The vision of Gandalf is to promote reading and provide books that inspire and educate—at attractive prices. To reach new customers in the extremely competitive book industry, the team at Gandalf and its agency Sempai wanted to develop an ad strategy that helped maximize profits while ensuring sales efficiency at a level that met customer satisfaction. Sempai manages over 850 accounts in Google Ads, running high-performance campaigns, mainly for clients from the highly competitive e-commerce segment. Gandalf and Sempai selected the Microsoft Advertising platform to run paid advertising because of its stellar reputation in Poland.

In July 2022, the first Gandalf campaign generated just over 3,300 ad clicks. The team then revised campaign strategy by verifying and improving conversion tracking implementation, expanding campaigns in the search network, optimizing remarketing campaigns, maximizing the potential of shopping campaigns, improving feed quality, excluding irrelevant keywords, improving keyword segmentation, and budget rotation. This helped Gandalf achieve better results and reach target book lovers more effectively.

Microsoft Advertising is our preferred advertising ecosystem. We give Microsoft Advertising the highest rating of 5 stars.

— Radosław Cetnarowicz, Management Board Member, Gandalf

The results were quantifiable and impressive. By March 2023 the Gandalf ad team increased the scale of the campaign more than four times, maintaining a stable average Cost per Click (CPC) of USD 0.062. By leveraging Microsoft Advertising, from July to September 2022, Gandalf saw a 1316% Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). And from October to December 2022, the ROAS was 1065%. By using Microsoft Advertising Gandalf achieved 100% higher revenues overall with budgets ranging from several hundreds to several thousand dollars per month.

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