Komplett effectively and easily bringing automation in-house

I’ve set up 1 account with Channable’s PPC tool that so far contains 16,000 ad groups and 32,000 keywords. Managing that manually would be impossible

With great power comes great responsibility

Komplett is the biggest electronics eCommerce player in the Nordics, with a catalog of 4 B2C and 3 B2B online shops with more than 110,000 products. Despite its immense size, the Komplett group operates all online marketing in-house. “We’re a little out of the ordinary because, at Komplett, we run everything in-house. We do everything for Facebook and Search ourselves.” Whilst this comes with the great benefit of having greater control, running things in-house comes with its own consequences. “As we have a limited amount of resources and personnel, we have to stay up-to-date with all new tech and features because we are not part of a community or larger agency.”

Another difficulty for the Komplett team was managing an incredibly large inventory. “The Komplett shops have around 17,000 products each and there are four different online shops. We also have a B2B account and there’s Webhallen in Sweden which has over 20,000 products and many physical stores.”

It was the large-scale inventory that led Christian and his team to search for a technological solution. “As we have such a huge inventory, the only way to handle it is a high degree of automation. The use of feeds and automatic smart bidding is the only way to promote 20,000 products. If you were to manually do it, it’d be totally hopeless. So, feed management is the only solution we can use to advertise online, at least in a good way.”

Feed management is not new to Christian, however, the previous system they used wasn’t very convenient. “You had to know FreeMarker code to make it work, which was very time-consuming. It was almost impossible to teach new colleagues and to collaborate in it because the setup was so advanced. It was way too complicated and not user-friendly in any way. Furthermore, as time went by, it struggled to keep up with the Google Ads changes. Leading to the interface badly syncing with the tool itself. When that started happening, and when I tried teaching new colleagues how to use it, we started to look for a new tool”.

After evaluating a few tools, Christian and his team decided to go with Channable because “the Channable interface looked easier to use, user-friendlier, and it also had much lower pricing.”

Everything is under control

Channable has been able to support Komplett’s different channel strategies. “We use Channable to make many export feeds specifically tailored to their purpose. We find it much better than having one feed to send to all sites. We have a lot of different feed exports for affiliates and price comparison sites. We have a separate feed from Google Shopping and a much more detailed feed going to SA360.” In addition to creating feeds, Channable has helped Komplett with minimizing errors and violations. “Google policy violations are a huge problem for us because we have so many products. Often, these policy warnings can be fixed. We use Channable to locate which product it is and then we either make a rule to fix the text if certain words violate the policy or we just exclude the product if there is nothing we can fix. We even find products and errors on our own website with Channable.”

TIP: I use the Channable rules to find product errors in our own inventory. It’s so much easier to find errors like products that have been implemented wrong in our system. I can automatically get a list from Channable that I then send to our content department.

In addition to feed management, Komplett has found value in Channable’s PPC tool. “Most of our accounts use inventory management in SA360, but you need to know regex to use SA360. So, I wanted to run a test where I set up the Channable PPC tool in a project that doesn’t use SA360's inventory management and try to compare Channable’s PPC tool and SA360’s inventory management. I was able to set it up in about a tenth of the time. When it comes to intuitiveness and simplicity, Channable is a top tool.”

Christian shared that Channable’s PPC tool isn’t only just intuitive. “It is very good to have feed management and the ability to manipulate the feed in the same tool. If I want to make adjustments to the SA360 feed, it requires more parties. So being able to do both in the same system and see the change in a couple of minutes is very helpful.”

A Komplett-e success

For Christian, Channable was able to provide the control the team needed. “The main benefit is a better overview and better control of things. It’s much less time-consuming. It’s much easier to train new people and to actually work together with colleagues in the tool with our own setup. Now, someone can fill in if I’m sick.” When working in small teams, it’s so valuable to leverage tools and systems that can be usable and accessible by all team members.

Komplett has also found value in Channable’s extra runs feature. This feature automatically fetches the product feed more frequently than every 24 hours. “With 12 runs a day, we have more accurate pricing and inventory on all the different places where we export our feed.”

The main thing about Channable is that it’s less time consuming, very effective, and it's a very good way to build dynamic ads. I like Channable! We’ve tried a couple of different systems, so we have the experience to say that Channable is very good.

Most loved feature?
“When you’re setting up a feed, in the rules part you can export a file directly that will show you all the products affected by the rule. This is a feature Channable built for me and that’s why I love it.”

Building momentum

Christian and his team are continually keen to explore more of Channable’s features. “My goal is to set up a few shopping campaigns with an ad group per category to make it more granular, it ought to work better with automation bidding. I also want to try to use more dynamic features in our text ads because we can pull in more information from the feed. I would also like to build responsive text ads.”

Christian’s advice to online marketers
In addition to sharing his experiences with Channable, we asked Christian what words of wisdom he has for fellow digital marketers working in eCommerce.

1. Automate “Stop old school manual work and just automate as much as possible. People hold back because of a lack of knowledge and it is a bit scary to give up that much control. You have to trust the system and sometimes the system doesn’t work. But the overall gain is so much bigger than doing it manually. We used to do it and it takes so much time and gives a worse performance.”


2. Healthy feeds “Focus on feed quality and feed hygiene as it is so much more important for success.”


3. Take control and manage your feeds in-house “Build your own components and start doing things in-house. An in-house team will always need tips and tricks for new features so marketing agencies will still exist. But marketing agencies will become more of a partner helping the in-house team.”

If you’ve been able to identify with Komplett’s pains and are curious to know more about how Channable can help, sign up for a demo or talk to a Channable representative today.