How Danone’s Global Team Helps Dozens of Local Teams Optimize PPC Accounts and Save 3.6% of Ad Spend

How Danone’s Global Team Helps Dozens of Local Teams Optimize PPC Accounts and Save 3.6% of Ad Spend

Results

3.6% of ad spend and hundreds of optimization hours saved

With TrueClicks, Danone’s local teams are able to save 3.6% of their ad spend, on average. Not bad, considering the tool costs Danone less than 0.1% of their spend—that’s a 36x ROI.
Danone’s mature markets have seen some of the most impressive results:

  • Germany saved and reinvested 20% of their yearly costs and increased their CTR by 17%
  • Turkey saw a +70% ROAS on specific campaigns and a 33% drop in CPC
  • The UK team saw a 20% drop in CPC

On top of that, Luuk estimates that TrueClicks saves each of the employees involved in search at both the global and local levels around 5-10% of the time they would previously have spent on monitoring and optimizations. That’s hundreds of hours the company saves each week.

“I can’t imagine having to do what TrueClicks does for us manually. It improves our performance across the board.”

THE customer

Luuk de Klijn
Global Search Lead, Danone

“TrueClicks fulfills a niche for us that we really needed. Our role is to flag when something is wrong and help local markets solve it. We couldn’t really do that before TrueClicks.”

Solutions

PPC optimization software

  • Designed for monitoring and auditing
  • Prioritized optimization recommendations
  • N-gram analysis to eliminate wasted spend
  • Implement changes to Google Ads

Danone is a leading global food and beverage company dedicated to inspiring healthier and more sustainable eating and drinking practices.

Challenge

Helping decentralized local teams optimize performance

As Danone’s Global Search Lead, Luuk de Klijn acts as an internal consultant and support for Danone’s independent local teams and agencies around the world, who are each responsible for their own budgets, resources, and results.

Luuk had no way to check in and audit local markets, short of going into their individual Google Ads accounts and auditing their account health manually. He needed a tool that would give his global team more insights into local performance, so he could help them curb wasted ad spend and monitor the performance of their agency partners.

“We had no way to properly monitor account quality across accounts. We had plenty of reporting in place for actual performance, but nothing in place to audit account quality and see how local teams and their partner agencies were actually executing.”

Solution

A monitoring and optimization tool to serve as single source of truth

Today, TrueClicks gives both the global and local teams at Danone a common starting point for all of their optimization efforts.

Local teams can easily work through a prioritized list of recommendations to optimize their accounts. The dashboards and account scoring system make it easy for Danone to audit their partner agencies’ performance and check on their account health at a glance.

For the global team, TrueClicks allows them to monitor the overall health of all Danone accounts and keep track of momentum, all in one place.

TrueClicks also flags critical issues faster: when an account migration caused one local market’s scores to plummet, the global team was able to spot the issue in TrueClicks and alert them to the problem.

“We reached out after one week and their agency partner in charge of the migration hadn’t alerted them, so they still didn’t know. Getting notified when things like that happen is very valuable for us. But the most value we get from TrueClicks on a day-to-day basis is being able to look at the trends, the highlights and lowlights of the accounts.”

Results & feedback from dentsu users globally

Jake Hughes
VP of Paid Search at dentsu US

“TrueClicks is clearly designed by search practitioners, for search practitioners. It's intuitive, powerful, and continuously improving!”

Stephan Orth
Head of Paid Search at iProspect Austria

"TrueClicks saves about 80% of the time spent on auditing, monitoring, and pacing campaigns—it's a huge difference. That's why I always say that your PPC journey can be divided into "Before TrueClicks" and "After TrueClicks."

Darko Perković
Senior Paid Search Manager at dentsu Croatia & Germany

"Sticking to a target budget pace is very important to some of our clients. Before I joined dentsu, my colleagues used spreadsheets and formulas for this. It was time-consuming and error-prone. We needed a simpler, more accurate, and reliable way to track budget pacing and TrueClicks delivered."

Paulina Beck
Paid Search Specialist at dentsu Norway

"I find the budget pacing function highly effective, as it saves valuable time and significantly improves the overall efficiency of budget management. The added benefit of receiving recommendations and notifications when errors happen makes it even more valuable."

Courtney Delaney
Paid Search Executive at dentsu UK

"I love how easy TrueClicks makes it to check and audit the account, allowing for quick fixes in the app, like adding negative keywords. I also appreciate the ability to tailor the flags to each account. Unlike the broad recommendations from Google or Microsoft, TrueClicks lets you customize flags based on your KPIs, helping cut through the noise and focus on what really matters."

Saul Rogers
Digital Excellence Manager at dentsu UK

“Issues are identified in real-time and can be fixed promptly. The daily update of the main dashboard is a great asset to our day-to-day management of accounts. Without TrueClicks, the time it takes to identify and resolve these issues—and then recheck to confirm our actions were effective—would increase exponentially."

Capucine Even
Consulting Director at iProspect France

"I love that TrueClicks gives recommendations and lets us make changes directly in Google Ads. Plus, we can also download results in Excel to share with clients."

Richelle Buitenhuis
PPC Specialist at dentsu Netherlands

"TrueClicks helps us set priorities within accounts immediately, saving valuable time. Another thing I love about TrueClicks is that it’s suitable for All PPC Levels: it supports both junior and senior PPC specialists. As a junior, it was incredibly helpful for me to learn how to identify focus points and understand what's essential in PPC. Now, as I've progressed in my career, I use the tool to monitor hygiene checks performed by colleagues and to focus on cost-saving and growth opportunities."

Aleksandra Klyha
Senior SEM Specialist at dentsu Poland

“Using TrueClicks has completely transformed the way we organize our weekly workflow. We start the week with a quick and clear review of budgets and targets in TrueClicks. Throughout the week, we rely on alerts for critical drops in campaign performance, allowing us to respond much faster, even when managing a large number of accounts and campaigns. Compared to before using TrueClicks, we freed up a lot of time that used to be spent on manual checks. Now, we can focus more on optimizing campaigns instead of getting lost in the details.”

Raissa Charles
Paid Search Director at dentsu UK

"TrueClicks has also been a great tool for junior team members, allowing them to explore all aspects of our account. Its scoring system is fair and transparent, making it easy to apply the same approach when taking action on the account. It also plays a key role in our best practice auditing process for client deliverables."

Danone

How Danone’s Global Team Helps Dozens of Local Teams Optimize PPC Accounts and Save 3.6% of Ad Spend

How Danone’s Global Team Helps Dozens of Local Teams Optimize PPC Accounts and Save 3.6% of Ad Spend

Company type
Brand
Industry
Global Food Company
Location
Global
Results
ROI
36x
Hours saved/week across teams
Hundreds

THE customer

Luuk de Klijn
Global Search Lead, Danone

“TrueClicks fulfills a niche for us that we really needed. Our role is to flag when something is wrong and help local markets solve it. We couldn’t really do that before TrueClicks.”

Solutions

PPC optimization software

  • Designed for monitoring and auditing
  • Prioritized optimization recommendations
  • N-gram analysis to eliminate wasted spend
  • Implement changes to Google Ads

Danone is a leading global food and beverage company dedicated to inspiring healthier and more sustainable eating and drinking practices.

Challenge

Helping decentralized local teams optimize performance

As Danone’s Global Search Lead, Luuk de Klijn acts as an internal consultant and support for Danone’s independent local teams and agencies around the world, who are each responsible for their own budgets, resources, and results.

Luuk had no way to check in and audit local markets, short of going into their individual Google Ads accounts and auditing their account health manually. He needed a tool that would give his global team more insights into local performance, so he could help them curb wasted ad spend and monitor the performance of their agency partners.

“We had no way to properly monitor account quality across accounts. We had plenty of reporting in place for actual performance, but nothing in place to audit account quality and see how local teams and their partner agencies were actually executing.”

Solution

A monitoring and optimization tool to serve as single source of truth

Today, TrueClicks gives both the global and local teams at Danone a common starting point for all of their optimization efforts.

Local teams can easily work through a prioritized list of recommendations to optimize their accounts. The dashboards and account scoring system make it easy for Danone to audit their partner agencies’ performance and check on their account health at a glance.

For the global team, TrueClicks allows them to monitor the overall health of all Danone accounts and keep track of momentum, all in one place.

TrueClicks also flags critical issues faster: when an account migration caused one local market’s scores to plummet, the global team was able to spot the issue in TrueClicks and alert them to the problem.

“We reached out after one week and their agency partner in charge of the migration hadn’t alerted them, so they still didn’t know. Getting notified when things like that happen is very valuable for us. But the most value we get from TrueClicks on a day-to-day basis is being able to look at the trends, the highlights and lowlights of the accounts.”

Results

3.6% of ad spend and hundreds of optimization hours saved

With TrueClicks, Danone’s local teams are able to save 3.6% of their ad spend, on average. Not bad, considering the tool costs Danone less than 0.1% of their spend—that’s a 36x ROI.
Danone’s mature markets have seen some of the most impressive results:

  • Germany saved and reinvested 20% of their yearly costs and increased their CTR by 17%
  • Turkey saw a +70% ROAS on specific campaigns and a 33% drop in CPC
  • The UK team saw a 20% drop in CPC

On top of that, Luuk estimates that TrueClicks saves each of the employees involved in search at both the global and local levels around 5-10% of the time they would previously have spent on monitoring and optimizations. That’s hundreds of hours the company saves each week.

“I can’t imagine having to do what TrueClicks does for us manually. It improves our performance across the board.”