Horus Center

The client

Horus Center (horus-center.ro) is an online shop for office supplies, stationery, cardboard packaging, IT, office furniture and cleaning and hygiene products, with the company registered since 2003 (Trade Register J03/1207/2003) and based in Argeș county, Romania. The catalogue covers both recurring consumption, paper, writing supplies, cleaning materials, and rarer purchases such as furniture or IT equipment, for a mixed audience of individual customers, businesses and, typically for this product category, institutions (schools, town halls, companies buying consumables on a regular cycle).

It is a mature, fragmented market: office supplies and stationery sold online compete with national specialist chains, with generalist marketplaces, and with local suppliers who work on direct relationships with institutions. Margins on basic consumables are usually thin, and volume and repeat orders matter as much as the first purchase; a customer who comes back monthly for paper and toner is worth more in the long run than a single large order.

In a market like that, paid advertising does not sell a unique new product, it sells availability and price on products the buyer can find elsewhere too. The difference between an account that produces and one that merely spends money rarely lies in creativity and almost always in the structure of the account and the quality of the data the bidding decision is based on.

The challenge

The starting point was a paid advertising account that was not producing. Budget was spent month after month, but the sales it generated did not justify the investment, the classic symptom of an account without proper structure or without good conversion data behind it. In that situation the problem is rarely “the budget is too small”; most often it is that money is going to irrelevant searches, that automated bidding is optimising on wrong or incomplete conversion data, or that budget allocation across product categories bears no relation to where real demand and margin justify the spend.

For a catalogue as heterogeneous as Horus Center’s, from cheap consumables bought often to furniture or IT bought rarely but at higher value, an unstructured account treats the whole catalogue the same way, which means money is spent uniformly regardless of where purchase intent actually exists and where the conversion closes.

What we did

We took over the existing advertising accounts, and the first step, before any new campaign, was an account audit: campaign structure, correctness of conversion tracking, search term reports from the preceding period, and how budget was distributed across product categories relative to demand and margin.

That audit matters for a mechanical reason, not just a procedural one: today’s automated bidding (Smart Bidding, Performance Max) calibrates its decisions on the conversion data it receives from the account. If conversion tracking is misconfigured or incomplete, for instance if the system does not correctly distinguish a sale from a plain visit, or does not record the real order value, the algorithm still optimises, but it optimises on wrong information, which means it spends steadily, and confidently, in the wrong direction. Fixing tracking is not a secondary technical detail; it is the precondition without which every other optimisation is blind.

Once the conversion data was correct, budget allocation could be moved to where search demand was real and where conversion actually closed, clearly separating high volume, low margin categories (where budget efficiency matters most, because every extra leu spent shows up directly in the margin) from occasional categories with higher order value. In practice, the account moved from “we spend budget on the whole catalogue equally” to “we spend budget in proportion to where the market pays to be found”. A properly structured account with good data does not automatically produce sales, but it does give every additional leu of budget a real chance of coming back as an order, which shows up directly in ROAS.

In parallel, as with FineBar, we worked on the same foundations, site and SEO, so paid traffic would not carry the whole load on its own: a shop with functioning SEO on high search volume categories reduces total dependence on paid budget for recurring orders, and site maintenance ensures a paid click lands on a product page that works, with correct stock and price.

Results

In the first 3 months after taking over the accounts, Horus Center reported:

• ROAS: 6 (that is, 6 lei generated in sales for every leu spent on advertising).
• Sales: up from 38,000 lei/month to 150,000 lei/month.

These are the figures reported by the client, for this account, in this period. The starting point was an account that was, in practice, not producing, which leaves room for growth that an already optimised account no longer has. We do not extrapolate this result as reproducible on any other account: the size of the increase depends on how far the account was from a functional level when we took it over, not on a universal formula that applies whatever the starting state.

Services involved

• Paid Search, audit, account restructuring, fixing conversion tracking and reallocating budget across categories.
• eCommerce, the shop platform, with product pages ready to support paid traffic.
• SEO & organic, organic visibility on categories with steady search volume.
• Performance, security & maintenance, maintenance of the site that receives the paid traffic.