How Channable and Netprofiler boosted Nelson Schoenen's growth by 98%

Netprofiler, a Netherlands-based digital growth agency, leveraged data, artificial intelligence and the Channanle platform to streamline image asset workflows at leading shoe retailer Nelson Schoenen. The strategy employed significantly reduced the manual burden of managing image assets while greatly enhancing their relevance, allowing the brand to continue its focus on pursuing further growth.

Since its founding in 1949, Nelson Schoenen has grown to become one of the leading shoe retailers in the Netherlands, boasting over 100 physical stores alongside a robust online presence.

Although the retailer’s growth has been impressive, it has also been accompanied by challenges. In particular, as the number of ad groups and asset groups used by the company in its online marketing grew, it has meant that the workflow for creating, uploading, and assigning image assets has become increasingly cumbersome and resource-intensive.

Netprofiler, a digital growth agency based in the Netherlands, came up with a way for Nelson Schoenen to continue its pursuit of growth without technical challenges holding it back. And it owed a lot to the Channable platform.

The challenge before Channable

Over the past few years, Nelson has been growing its online presence using Google Ads. Through Channable, the company has largely been able to automate the creation and management of its advertising. However, while ad copies, keywords and campaign structures were easily generated with a few rules, automating image assets has always been an obstacle.

Nelson Schoenen's previous experience with automating their Google Ads campaigns highlighted a significant hurdle: the manual and time-consuming process of managing image assets for both image extensions and performance max (PMAX) image assets.

The limitations of Google Ads' interface and Editor made the process of managing image assets a unique challenge. The retailer’s existing workflow for creating, uploading, and assigning image assets was not only burdensome but became increasingly impractical as the company's online presence grew.

The objective

The main objective for Nelson Schoenen and Netprofiler was to find a way of completely overhauling the existing workflow of managing image assets. This involved:

• Streamlining the process: The project aimed to automate the various components around image management, including creating, uploading, and correctly assigning these assets to ad groups and asset groups.

• Move away from generic image assets: To enhance the relevance of ad group images to ensure that potential customers encounter highly relevant visuals in their search ads, directly contributing to the ads' effectiveness and appeal.

• Support growth: As Nelson’s inventory and product portfolio change continuously, we wanted to make sure that newly added product brands and models were automatically assigned an image without any manual input required.

Implementing Channable

The key to the successful implementation of Netprofiler’s strategy arrived with the launch of ChatGPT. The large language model, which has generated so much buzz in the tech world, enabled Netprofiler to write a Google Ads automation script without external developer assistance. While the initial script wasn’t perfect, it laid the groundwork for integration with Channable’s feed management solutions, including its recently launched PMAX Assets beta functionality.

The script created by ChatGPT enabled Nelson to automatically generate and assign image extensions, greatly streamlining the image asset management process for both standard search campaigns and PMAX campaigns. Tasks that previously relied on significant manual work could now be automated, including uploading images to the asset library and assigning them to the appropriate campaigns, ad groups and asset groups.

Results: Boosting efficiency and engagement

Netprofiler’s approach created two distinct workflows: one for managing image extensions in regular search campaigns and another for managing image assets in PMAX campaigns.

This twin approach combined the power of Channable and Google Ads script by importing a CSV feed from Channable and using data to perform a series of tasks in the relevant Google Ads account. This meant all ad groups and asset groups were updated daily with the most relevant and up-to-date image assets, significantly reducing manual workload and enhancing the campaigns' overall effectiveness.
As a result of Netprofiler’s utilization of the Channable platform:

• Setup time for image asset management was reduced from 128 hours (or 16 working days) to just two hours.

• The process of maintaining up-to-date, relevant image assets became significantly more manageable.

• Nelson Schoenen enjoyed a 98% reduction in manual labor.

• Each ad group and asset group was equipped with images that closely matched the advertised products - improving ad relevance, click-through rate and potential customer engagement.

The strategy employed by Netprofiler encompassed many different features of the Channable platform, including Channable Insights and the Dynamic Image Editor. The former made use of performance data to identify and display the most popular image variant for each product model, while the latter was used to create seasonal variants for each product image.

Streamlining Nelson’s strategy with Channable

The strategic use of Channable and Google Ads scripts, empowered by the latest technology like ChatGPT, has set a new standard in digital advertising automation. By streamlining the management of image assets, Nelson Schoenen has not only saved time and effort but also significantly enhanced the relevance and impact of its ads.

The success of Netprofiler’s approach suggests that this is a strategy that would be easy to reproduce and apply to other aspects of digital marketing. At Channable, we are excited by the potential that Nelson Schoenen’s ChatGPT-inspired script contains for integrating a similar feature into our platform for image extensions.

Whatever the next development in the online ad space, it’s likely that automation will be part of it. As this recent success story involving Nelson Schoenen, Netprofiler, and Channable showed, the case for innovation in digital marketing is always a compelling one, regardless of a company’s recent successes.