Sparkles.io boosts Google Ads profitability YoY & achieves 30x ROI on subscription cost

Sparkles.io, a leading Dutch eCommerce company, have used Lunio since January 2022 to maximize the efficiency of their paid search campaigns. As they aggressively scaled ad spend throughout 2022 and 2023, Lunio helped them stick to ambitious CPA targets for a range of key customer types, by minimizing waste caused by bots and invalid traffic.

Key stats:

• Up to €382k saved on Google Ads in 2022

• Up to €548k saved on Google Ads in 2023

• 30x ROI on cost of subscription
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‍Sparkles.io is a leading DTC retail brand based in the Netherlands. Their mission is to “inspire people with personalized products for life’s special moments” with an easy-to-use platform for creating personalized products for special occasions like cards, invitations, gifts, and more.

The business has been on an award-winning growth trajectory since it was founded in 2011, quickly becoming the go-to market leader in the Netherlands.

Maintaining ad spend efficiency

Christian de Rijke, is the Product Owner and former Performance Marketing Manager at Sparkles.io. While leading the Performance Marketing team, Christian was working with an essentially unlimited budget.

He could spend aggressively provided he maintained a good ROAS ratio and stayed within CPA targets for a range of key customer types (e.g. birthday card senders). So his main challenge was to find and implement strategies to keep costs down while maximizing sales volume across paid search.

Google Ads refunds

In 2021, Christian and his team were on track to spend more than €1M+ on Google Search alone by the end of the year. And some of that spend was being automatically refunded by Google at the end of each month in the form of “invalid activity adjustments”.

But on average, they were only getting back around €500 with each adjustment. Given they were spending tens of thousands every month, Christian suspected more money was going to waste which wasn’t being accounted for by Google’s automatic refunds.

This prompted Christian to further investigate the problem of invalid traffic to verify the true scale of the problem across their paid search campaigns.

Why Sparkles.io chose Lunio

In late 2021, Christian and his team went through a procurement process, with Lunio being compared against another invalid traffic prevention solution for an initial trial period. Lunio was selected based on a much quicker and less manual setup, higher cost savings, and the ability to investigate user journeys via the clicks log.

"I’m a skeptic. So I did a lot of digging within the Lunio clicks log to sense check the visitors that had been marked as invalid. Firstly, it was easy to see how Dutch visitors were being identified through their click data and marked as valid by the algorithm.

“For those marked as invalid, I could often see suspicious patterns of activity. For example, some IP addresses would repeatedly visit and bounce within a 30 second window. Lunio would quickly flag these interactions as invalid, and automatically exclude the associated IP address from our campaigns. Being able to investigate the activity within the clicks log is what convinced me to go with Lunio" said Christian.

Sparkles.io switched on Lunio protection across their Google Search campaigns in January 2022. In just the first three months, 66k clicks from invalid sources were detected – with an associated cost saving of €106k.

This proof of value, which could be cross-referenced via the clicks log, led Christian to quickly expand Lunio protection to the entirety of their paid advertising campaigns, across Google Ads, Bing, Meta, Pinterest, and YouTube.

The results

Sparkles.io have continued to significantly increase their ad spend YoY, especially across Paid Search and PMax campaigns. While bigger spend means more exposure to invalid traffic, the cost savings have continued to increase. This led to significant growth in Google Ads cost savings.

These cost savings meant Sparkles.io achieved a 30x ROI on the cost of their Lunio subscription for 2023. Numbers like these made it easy for Christian to build an annual business case for senior stakeholders at Sparkles.io, demonstrating the value Lunio was delivering across their paid media campaigns. Based on data from Q1, he was also able to forecast that up to €1M will be saved in 2024.

"I’d recommend Lunio primarily to large businesses spending millions on Google Ads each year. It offers a meaningful competitive advantage at that scale. The value we get from protecting our campaigns against invalid traffic consistently increases as we ramp up our ad spend" said Christian.