Over the last years, Adlibris has experienced a growing dependency on Google. This has resulted in increased investments, impacting overall profitability.

“We saw a decrease in the organic traffic over several years. At the same time, our investments in Google shopping kept increasing, resulting in an ever-increasing cost of sales”, says Sakari Luovio (Chief sales officer, Adlibris).

A few years ago, Adlibris set up agile teams but struggled to integrate them with the traditional organisation. They ended up with too many initiatives and faced challenges with prioritisation and overlapping responsibilities. At the same time, the traditional organisation was to a great extent siloed based on channels and expertises, with individual analysis and optimisation, resulting in the lack of a holistic view.

“This was a really interesting project, with so many questions to handle. We had such a great collaboration with Jonas and the management team during our work and we developed a great solution together”, says Kristoffer Nyrén, senior management consultant at Kapero.

Tied to an industry-logic of marketing contributions from book publishers, they also struggled to find the balance between the very high focus on promoting newly released books, rather than their long tail of books and guiding the customers to their next reading experience. Altogether, marketing investments and resources got fragmented into lots of activities with low impact and high maintenance costs.

To tackle the growing dependency on Google, Adlibris were trying to make the most of it and explore the possibilities within Googles Performance Max campaigns and value-based bidding. But with a too large gap between the digital team in the marketing department and the sales organisation, this was not without challenges.

There was a mis-alignment between the base structure for the campaigns in Google Ads and the business categories within Adlibris sales department. Additionally, frequent changes to the campaign goals to handle needs from different stakeholders, made it impossible for the algorithm to learn and stabilise.

Ruby Gaylong, management consultant and digital specialist at Kapero, explains: “To create differentiation within the Google universe, or any other digital ad platform, it is more important than ever to bring business and marketing closer to each other. This gives the digital team the right input to ensure a relevant set-up for the business, shift to the bigger picture and leave the details to the algorithms. And category managers get means to steer their categories in the digital channels”.

Kapero was tasked with analysing the current commercial operations to identify potential improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. Subsequently, Kapero and Adlibris jointly developed a new operating model to better align and clarify the focus among sales, marketing, and product perspectives, resulting in a more efficient organisation with a better impact.

“I was really impressed – Kapero managed to help us aligning organisational perspectives, processes and customer behaviour all the way down to the structure in our Google set-up. We now have a much clearer focus in the different parts of our organisation and an operating model that allows us to optimise both profitability and growth”, concludes Jonas Karlén (CEO, Adlibris).