Danone

How Danone’s Global Team Helps Dozens of Local Teams Optimize PPC Accounts and Save 3.6% of Ad Spend

How Danone’s Global Team Helps Dozens of Local Teams Optimize PPC Accounts and Save 3.6% of Ad Spend

Use case
Brands
Industry
Global Food Company
Location
Worldwide
Results
ROI
36x
Hours saved/week across teams
Hundreds
THE customer
Luuk de Klijn
Global Search Lead, Danone

“TrueClicks fulfills a niche for us that we really needed. Our role is to flag when something is wrong and help local markets solve it. We couldn’t really do that before TrueClicks.”

Solutions

PPC optimization software

  • Designed for monitoring and auditing
  • Prioritized optimization recommendations
  • N-gram analysis to eliminate wasted spend
  • Implement changes to Google Ads

Danone is a leading global food and beverage company dedicated to inspiring healthier and more sustainable eating and drinking practices.

Challenge

Helping decentralized local teams optimize performance

As Danone’s Global Search Lead, Luuk de Klijn acts as an internal consultant and support for Danone’s independent local teams and agencies around the world, who are each responsible for their own budgets, resources, and results.

Luuk had no way to check in and audit local markets, short of going into their individual Google Ads accounts and auditing their account health manually. He needed a tool that would give his global team more insights into local performance, so he could help them curb wasted ad spend and monitor the performance of their agency partners.

“We had no way to properly monitor account quality across accounts. We had plenty of reporting in place for actual performance, but nothing in place to audit account quality and see how local teams and their partner agencies were actually executing.”

Solution

A monitoring and optimization tool to serve as single source of truth

Today, TrueClicks gives both the global and local teams at Danone a common starting point for all of their optimization efforts.

Local teams can easily work through a prioritized list of recommendations to optimize their accounts. The dashboards and account scoring system make it easy for Danone to audit their partner agencies’ performance and check on their account health at a glance.

For the global team, TrueClicks allows them to monitor the overall health of all Danone accounts and keep track of momentum, all in one place.

TrueClicks also flags critical issues faster: when an account migration caused one local market’s scores to plummet, the global team was able to spot the issue in TrueClicks and alert them to the problem.

“We reached out after one week and their agency partner in charge of the migration hadn’t alerted them, so they still didn’t know. Getting notified when things like that happen is very valuable for us. But the most value we get from TrueClicks on a day-to-day basis is being able to look at the trends, the highlights and lowlights of the accounts.”

Results

3.6% of ad spend and hundreds of optimization hours saved

With TrueClicks, Danone’s local teams are able to save 3.6% of their ad spend, on average. Not bad, considering the tool costs Danone less than 0.1% of their spend—that’s a 36x ROI.
Danone’s mature markets have seen some of the most impressive results:

  • Germany saved and reinvested 20% of their yearly costs and increased their CTR by 17%
  • Turkey saw a +70% ROAS on specific campaigns and a 33% drop in CPC
  • The UK team saw a 20% drop in CPC

On top of that, Luuk estimates that TrueClicks saves each of the employees involved in search at both the global and local levels around 5-10% of the time they would previously have spent on monitoring and optimizations. That’s hundreds of hours the company saves each week.

“I can’t imagine having to do what TrueClicks does for us manually. It improves our performance across the board.”