The real competitor was a line item on the internet bill
New-to-brand orders +134%
A router brand was fighting other routers for people already shopping for routers. The much larger audience was renting equipment from their provider every month and had never considered owning one.
At a glance
- Category
- Networking
- Marketplaces
- US
- Revenue at start
- $295k / month
- Insight
- Most of the addressable audience was not shopping at all
- Engagement
- PPC + DSP
- Timeframe
- 12 months
Results
The challenge
Every dollar the brand spent went into the router category's search results, where a finite number of people are actively shopping and eight brands bid for each of them. The market was not growing; the bids were.
The far larger group never appears in that auction. They are paying their internet provider a monthly fee for a rented box, they have never been unhappy enough to investigate, and they do not search for routers because they do not know they are in the market. The arithmetic in their favour is unambiguous — the rental typically costs more in under a year than owning outright — but no one had ever put that comparison in front of them, least of all a search ad that only shows up if they go looking.
Our approach
We spent where the audience is unaware, and made the comparison do the persuading.
- Payback in months as the central message — the rental fee against the purchase price, stated as a break-even date rather than as a saving.
- DSP against in-market and lifestyle audiences who show no router intent at all — which is deliberate, because the demand has to be created before it can be captured.
- Creative built around the bill, not the hardware, since the hardware means nothing to someone who has never chosen one.
- The setup objection answered first — the fear of losing internet for an evening is the actual blocker, ahead of price.
- Search kept running underneath to capture the intent DSP generates, with branded terms defended as awareness grew.
Timeline
Establish the baseline
- Category search performance isolated so DSP impact could be read separately
- Payback message drafted and tested against three alternatives
- Creative rebuilt around the monthly fee rather than specifications
Build unaware demand
- DSP scaled against audiences with no router intent
- Branded search volume tracked as the leading indicator
- Setup-anxiety content added to listings and A+ after it dominated survey responses
Capture and compound
- Search budget shifted toward branded and comparison terms
- Retargeting window extended to 30 days after data showed a long consideration gap
- Two mid-tier SKUs repositioned as the entry point for switchers
Inside the ad account
Anonymized account view, rebuilt from the figures reported above: ad sales growing from $133k to $275k a month while ACoS falls from 28% to 22% across the 12-month engagement.
The results
New-to-brand orders more than doubled and so did revenue, with total ad cost of sales — display included — still falling two points. That is an unusual combination, and a consequence of leaving an auction where everyone was bidding for the same finite demand.
Forty-one percent of sales now originate outside category search. The mechanism is that the brand stopped asking “why this router” and started asking “why are you still renting”, which is a question the competition was not answering because they were all standing in the same aisle.
“Every brand in our category was fighting over the people already in the store. We went and talked to the ones on the sidewalk.”
Services we delivered
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