Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 29.10.2025 
European Agency Awards Finalist Spotlight: Matthieu Tran-Van shares how business-driven automation achieved record growth.
When I first got the call from OK Jardin, I wasn’t looking for another client. I was looking for a challenge.
They sold swimming-pool equipment: the same brands, the same SKUs, the same price as everyone else. A market where weather, not marketing, usually decides who wins.
They asked me one question:
“Can we grow even during low season?”
And the rest is history.
The challenge: same products, same market, different mindset
Spring was approaching, but it was still cold in France. No one was thinking about pools yet.
Sales were flat. CPCs were rising. And the catalogue was a beast, more than 6,000 SKUs with margins that swung from a few euros to several hundred.
On paper, it didn’t look like a recipe for success. But I saw an opportunity hiding in the data. Most advertisers try to outspend the competition. I prefer to out-think them. If the market is driven by the weather, margins, and price competitiveness ; why not teach Google Ads to understand those signals and act accordingly?
That became the mission: Build a campaign that manages itself, reacts in real time, and thinks like a business.
Building an automation that knows what matters
I started by pulling in every piece of data I could:
- live pricing scraped from competitors,
- SKU-level margin buckets,
- inventory priority,
- and even weather forecasts.
Then, with Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and Smart Labeler, I turned all that chaos into order.
Every product in the feed received a set of Custom Labels that captured its business DNA:
margin level, price competitiveness and stock urgency.
These labels weren’t cosmetic. They were the logic behind every bid, every impression, every euro spent.
When a product had high margin and low competition, Google automatically bid more aggressively. When bad weather hit, spend dropped. When inventory ran low, bids scaled down. No guesswork. No manual adjustments. Just a system that adapted faster than any human could.
When data meets creativity
But I didn’t stop there.
I layered geo-localized Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns to amplify best-sellers when the sun returned. The moment warmer weather triggered demand in southern France, those local campaigns switched on automatically.
One morning, I opened my dashboard and saw spikes in conversions from regions where the temperature had just crossed 22°C. That’s when I knew the system was working. It was no longer reacting, it was anticipating.
This is what I call business-driven automation: humans define the strategy, machines execute it flawlessly.
The results we didn’t expect
The impact still amazes me.
In five months, revenue passed €1 million, up more than 200 % year over year, during what used to be the slow season. Ad spend rose 130%, but efficiency improved dramatically: ROAS averaged above 10:1, far beyond the 5:1 target. Traffic tripled, CPCs fell 43 %, and CPAs dropped 31 %.
And perhaps the most satisfying part? We didn’t add a single extra hour of manual work. The campaigns ran, adapted, and optimized themselves.
What this project taught me
When people talk about automation, they often talk about losing control. I see it differently.
True automation gives you control, if you teach it what to care about.
What we built with OK Jardin wasn’t just a campaign. It was a conversation between business intelligence and artificial intelligence. Margins, weather, and stock weren’t side notes; they became the language Google used to make decisions.
That’s why the client’s reaction meant everything to me. For the first time, they didn’t fear the algorithm, they trusted it. Because now, the algorithm was following their rules.
“You made Google Ads feel like our business has a brain,” they told me. That line stayed with me.
Why being shortlisted matters
When I learned that this work had been shortlisted for the European Agency Awards 2025, I felt a mix of surprise and pride. I’m not an agency of 50. I’m one person, one laptop, and a belief that strategy still matters in a world of automation.
To see my name alongside Europe’s biggest agencies is an honour. It proves that expertise, curiosity, and discipline can still compete with size.
What matters isn’t how many people you have, it’s how deep you’re willing to think.
For me, this nomination isn’t just about a case study. It’s about a philosophy: Automation doesn’t replace strategy. It amplifies it.
That line sums up everything I believe about modern advertising.
Looking ahead
Since that project, I’ve applied the same framework to other verticals, where demand fluctuates according to contextual signals. Each time, the result is the same: when campaigns understand what drives profit, they scale sustainably.
The next step for me is to keep pushing this frontier. To help advertisers reconnect automation with common sense. To show that AI isn’t the enemy, it’s the amplifier of good thinking.
About me
I’m Matthieu Tran-Van, a Google Ads consultant, author, and educator based in Toulouse (France).
For 17 years, I’ve helped brands and marketers build Google Ads campaigns that grow profitably by aligning targeting, creative, automation, and business data.
When I’m not working with clients, I share insights on my blog matthieu-tranvan.fr and on social networks such as Linkedin, where I advocate for a smarter, more human approach to advertising automation.
