Selling the shredder to people shopping for shredder bags

The head terms for the machines themselves are among the most expensive in the category, because every competitor bids on them and the order value justifies almost any click price. The brand was paying $94 in advertising for each machine sold and treating that as the cost of doing business.

What nobody had looked at was the other half of the catalog. The consumables — bags, pouches, cartridges, blades — generate far more searches than the machines do, cost a fraction per click, and are searched by exactly one kind of person: someone who owns a machine of this type, uses it regularly, and knows what it does. In a category where the durable is replaced every three or four years, a large share of those people are within a year of buying their next one. The brand was selling them consumables and saying nothing else.

We inverted the usual direction and used the cheap product as the discovery surface for the expensive one.

• Machine campaigns aimed at consumable search terms, where the click costs roughly a fifth of the machine head term and the shopper is pre-qualified by ownership.
• Sponsored Display on the brand's own consumable pages, which is free inventory in the sense that the visitor is already ours.
• Consumable listings rebuilt to carry an upgrade path — A+ modules showing which machines the consumable fits and what the newer models do differently.
• Creative that leads with capacity and duty cycle, the two things a current owner has an opinion about and a first-time buyer does not.

The cost of acquiring a machine sale fell from $94 to $48, and machine units almost doubled while revenue grew 65%.

The mechanism is cheap intent: a shopper searching for a consumable has already made the category decision the expensive keyword is trying to buy, and their click costs a fraction as much. The consumables business did not shrink either — it grew with the installed base the machines created, which is what makes this compound rather than trade one product against another.