Case 01 · Garden & Seeds · Switzerland
More revenue in peak season, without a single franc more budget.
A rebuilt campaign structure, a cleaned-up product feed and modern segmentation.
saemereien.ch is one of the largest Swiss online shops for seeds and gardening supplies, over 5'000 varieties across two language markets, and an account that had been profitable for years. That is exactly the difficulty: where a lot already works, every additional franc of revenue has to come from better efficiency, not from more budget. I took over the account, rebuilt it structurally and sharpened the bid steering. In the first full peak season under my management, ROAS rose noticeably, on a practically unchanged budget and with 15.2 percent more orders.
Starting point
Botanik Saemereien AG runs one of Switzerland's broadest seed and gardening shops with saemereien.ch, in German and French, strongly seasonal with a clear spring peak. The account had been profitable for years and ran at a high level.
Challenge
Competitive pressure on Google Ads rises year after year, click prices climb and squeeze profitability. For a strongly seasonal shop that makes most of its annual revenue in a few spring months, this is especially delicate: whoever buys too expensively in peak season cannot make it up over the rest of the year. So the task was not to spend more, but to get more out of the same budget in the most important season.
Approach
I took over the account and started with a structured audit instead of immediately touching bids. On that basis I rebuilt the account for the coming season: a cleaner campaign structure, a tidied-up product feed and bid steering consistently aimed at target profitability rather than pure volume.
What I did concretely
- Split Performance Max by product tiers (top, mid, low), so budget and target ROAS are steered per product group instead of across the board.
- Opened up the full assortment via dynamic targeting, including the thousands of varieties for which individual keywords do not pay off.
- Cleanly separated brand and generic search, plus a full mutual-exclusion architecture and brand search on exact match, so ad groups no longer cannibalise each other and expensive generic clicks do not run through the cheap brand search.
- Rebuilt the product feed from the ground up: product categories fully populated, titles and data quality improved, rejected products cleaned up, and additional attributes generated for the most valuable items, the signals an increasingly AI-driven search looks at. I never overwrote existing product data, only added to it.
- Sharpened bid steering to target ROAS, with deliberate headroom for peak season.
- Extended assortment and markets: built the roses range as an entirely new category and mirrored the French-speaking market on the structure that works in German-speaking Switzerland.
Results
The rebuild had to prove itself in the peak season, because that is where the year is decided. It did so in every single month: February, March, April and May all came in above the prior year, so the gain does not rest on one lucky month.
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Ad budget | ±0% |
| Orders | +15.2% |
| Revenue | +11.1% |
| ROAS | +11.5% |
The decisive point: the growth did not come from more budget. With practically the same ad spend, profitability rose by 11.5 percent. Because the ad budget stayed effectively flat, the additional volume arose with practically no additional ad costs. At the old efficiency, the same revenue would have cost around 11.5 percent more budget. Instead of buying more expensively, every franc spent became more productive.
“For many years we have relied on Google Ads, but over time our campaigns were no longer up to date and the account had become cluttered. Thanks to Stefan, our account is clearly structured again, aligned with the new campaign types and set up to be future-proof. The result: a noticeably more efficient use of our ad budget.”
Roland Hagenbüchli, Deputy Managing Director, Botanik Saemereien AG
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