Home
/
Portfolio
/
BioTechUSA

BioTechUSA

How we achieved 40% growth in Slovakia, 93% in Romania and 28% in Croatia

Segment

Food/Nutritional Supplements

Services

Google Ads, Meta Ads, Linkbuilding, SEO

In the 1990s, it was merely a small Hungarian company. Today, it’s a leading seller of nutritional supplements and fitness clothing. BioTechUSA currently operates in more than 100 countries.

In addition to brick-and-mortar stores, which form the basis of the business, the company also invests in building e-shop in 49 languages. Soon, up to six of them will grow, not least thanks to Dexfinity. Currently, this relates to the Slovak, Czech, Romanian, Croatian and Polish B2C online stores.

Initial situation

At the beginning of 2022, we won the tender to manage Google and Meta Ads. We managed PPC campaigns for three markets, each at a different stage of development:

Slovakia was running already, but did not achieve the expected results,
BioTechUSA could not establish itself on the Croatian market
and they were still planning to enter the Romanian market.

The goal for Dexfinity was clear – to increase turnover and get the online store into the green after entering the Romanian market.

How to approach marketing if CTR is not the goal

BioTechUSA targets people who are interested in healthy nutrition and fitness. We know from experience that such clients need a more sophisticated approach and we also have placed an emphasis on the brand. Performance campaigns alone would have no chance of getting them to the forefront of minds when it comes to vitamins and proteins.

That’s why we chose a time-proven approach of the STDC (See-Think-Do-Care) model, which perfectly covers all phases of the buying cycle and at the same time allows for tracking different metrics for different phases.

CTR is not the only indicator

Right from the beginning of our collaboration, the client did not emphasise the CTR (cost to turnover ratio) from online store advertising campaigns. On the contrary. We all agreed that in the case of BioTechUSA, we needed to look at the brand as a whole.

The CTR of the online store is only one part of the puzzle. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but simply effective enough that all other marketing channels and offline activities of brick-and-mortar operations fit together. BioTechUSA is a truly omnichannel marketing and sales company with a holistic approach.

We wanted powerful campaigns, but while respecting a proper division between budget and brand building.

Changing the structure of the evaluation of results

We set up the entire marketing funnel to the STDC strategy and we determined different KPIsDefinition KPI is an abbreviation of the phrase ‘key performance indicator’. The term KPIs (key performance indicators) is simply the plural of the sa… More for each phase (key performance indicators).

SEE Phase: This covered particularly acquisition activities, where we tried to reach the widest possible range of new potential customers, get to know them and get an audience for later remarketing. For conversions, we monitored the number of people contacted, clicks on the website and how much time they spent on it.

THINK phase: In the second phase we actively worked with an audience that showed interest in BioTechUSA products in the previous one. We aimed product and brand campaigns at them and made full use of remarketing.

DO phase: The third phase is mainly conversion. We quickly found that the investment in the first two phases paid off and we launched performance max campaigns, search campaigns and Advantage+ shopping campaigns. We primarily looked at the increase in conversions with regard to ROAS.

CARE phase: BioTechUSA launched a loyalty program in which customers collect points and convert them into discounts. Every registered user is involved and thus has an additional motivation to buy.

This strategy worked very well. As people began to spend more time on the website, the number of clicks increased alongside the awareness of the brand and therefore the conversions.

Setting up PPC campaigns

After determining the strategy and choosing appropriate KPIs, we moved on to the actual advertising campaigns on Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook, Instagram). We took over the Slovak and Croatian accounts from another agency and we established the Romanian one completely from scratch in July 2023. What steps did we take?

Everything starts with an audit

On the Slovak market, we started with an audit of the Google Ads account and based on that we created campaigns so that we had all the strong categories covered.

Setting up a Romanian account

The Romanian market was completely new and we created all the settings from scratch. We chose a structure similar to that in Slovakia.

We concentrated on:

smart shopping campaigns (today’s performance max campaigns)
search campaigns for the brand and top categories that we knew both from experience and data had potential (amino acids, protein bars, proteins and the like).

This combination has proven itself to work, as shopping campaigns together with brand search campaigns still make up the vast majority of campaigns.

BioTechUSA Days

GymBeam is a big competitor for BioTechUSA in Slovakia and on the other markets. That’s why we spend a large part of the budget for brand building.

A special 20% discount during BioTechUSA Days greatly helps the acquisition of new customers. On this occasion we always create special campaigns, which advise people about a one-day sale 2-3 days in advance.

Thanks to such special offers, the email database of the client, who has a very well-managed email marketing structure, is also expanding.

Challenges in managing social networks

In addition to PPC campaigns, we also needed to align campaigns on social networks with the set STDC strategy. But we faced several challenges.

Beware of the XML feed with nutritional supplements

With social networks, we expected a problem with advertising in advance. Facebook takes a strict approach to nutritional supplements and not everyone gets approved for ads. In addition, there is no time for experimentation, a few rejections and you have a problem with the entire advertising account.

That’s why right from the beginning, we were careful to ensure that only products that we were sure Facebook would allow flow into XML feeds. We didn’t want to risk blocking the whole account.

Budgeting had no strategy

Previous agencies that managed the account in Slovakia and Croatia maintenanced campaigns. Real focus was missing.

To solve this problem, we built a scheme of campaigns on the STDC model. Thanks to this, the entire account received a comprehensive strategy and we covered the entire customer journey with appropriately targeted content.

The right piece of cake for both brand and performance

For BioTechUSA, Facebook and social networks in general are mainly an acquisition channel, where they acquire new customers. In Hungary Google is more effective for us. In the first step, we divided the campaigns into brand and performance campaigns.

For every group, we determined their own KPI and ROAS performance campaigns (required return on advertising expenditure). Since the fulfillment of a certain rate of return was the main goal, the budget went first to performance. If we achieved it, we could use the remaining budget to support the brand.

For example, during the BioTech Day event, in one day we earned ten times the amount invested in advertising in Slovakia alone.

SEO and linkbuilding

We recommended the client work with existing content and create new content at the same time. Articles that have been published for a very long time will start to decline and their traffic will decrease. Google simply likes new content. Therefore, it is important that the best performing articles are added and improved from time to time.

According to this strategy, we:

identified articles with the greatest potential,
supplemented the text with additional keywords and information.

Thanks to this, Google saw the article as updated and reindexed it. This ultimately resulted in an increase in clicks and views that reached even higher levels than during the peak performance before the blog update.

We achieved a year-on-year 40% increase in clicks and 76% increase in impressions just from blog articles.

At the same time, we took a detailed look at the website itself, where we optimised individual categories. We also modified the meta descriptions and headlines.

These changes together with link building brought more excellent numbers, a 125% year-on-year increase in the number of clicks on products and product categories.

The project in numbers

Results

+40%

YoY turnover growth in Slovakia

The STDC strategy and quality video content, which we received from the client for campaigns, helped the whole growth. At a certain point, the smaller Slovak market was able to overtake the Italian or Austrian market.

+28%

YoY turnover growth in Croatia

That is still not enough, and we already know the reasons why the client has not been able to make a full impact on this market. Currently, the offline support for brick-and-mortar stores is missing and Google does not support shopping campaigns on the Croatian market.

+93%

YoY turnover growth in Romania

Here, we are comparing the year 2022, when we have already been working on market development for 10 months, with the year 2023. That is a very similar period of time.

Despite a relatively small budget (YoY +31% increase on META, and +41% increase on Google Ads), we achieved great numbers that even the client did not expect.

There is also Shop Builder, which is owned by BioTechUSA. It is one of the market leaders there who are also selling BioTechUSA and their own brand as well.

We found that the combination of brand and performance campaigns for social networks does not work at all. Here, only the investment in the brand pays off. On the other hand, we can still obtain quality data for future remarketingRemarketing is the repeated display of targeted ads to potential customers based on their previous interactions with the site. Learn more now. More.

What is the secret of success?

BioTechUSA is specific in that it is not a Slovak company with which we are expanding into new markets. It is a Hungarian company that was looking for a marketing partner to help it improve its turnover in Slovakia.

Thanks to great results, today Dexfinity is the only agency that manages PPC campaigns for BioTechUSA in multiple markets (currently Dexfinity covers activities in six countries, in 2024 Poland and France were also added).

It is delivered thanks to:

- An experienced team of specialists, which does an excellent job. Because without results, we would never have been able to manage four markets.
- Patience and a marketing strategy: We managed to divide the purchase journey into four stages according to the STDC model, thanks to which we can measure relevant metrics for each stage.
- Brand investment: BioTechUSA is a client with a long-term strategy, willingness to invest in branding and reputation building. This works excellently and the year-on-year results only confirm it.
- We work with local people: We have a local person in Romania who helps BioTech improve the customer experience. For example, we advised them of a missing payment gateway or revealed an error when logging into a customer account. We complete activities beyond Google Ads, SEO or social media management. We simply want the client to grow.