Paid Search Optimization: Smith‑St and Coles with Adthena Insights

Paid search optimization in action: Smith St and Coles with Adthena insights

Smith St. and Coles partnered with Adthena to gain a clear view of their paid search landscape, monitoring Woolworths and the wider market to ensure Coles remained front of mind for shoppers through strategic paid search optimization.

By leveraging competitor insights and market trend data, the team optimized seasonal demand capture, boosting paid search traffic growth by 10% year-over-year while maintaining the same level of marketing budget.

10% bidding efficiency gain

5% above peer-set SOV

10% traffic growth YoY

Main Challenges

The grocery market has become fiercely competitive, with consumer behavior shifting rapidly due to the rise of delivery platforms and growing e-commerce expectations. Coles needed to navigate partnerships with delivery services to reach more customers and drive incremental sales, while ensuring these collaborations did not erode their paid media efficiency or weaken brand presence.

Alongside these pressures, Coles faced intensifying competition across the digital marketplace, as large online retailers increasingly blurred the line between grocery and general e-commerce. Yet Woolworths remained their most direct rival, requiring Coles to benchmark closely against their pricing, promotions, and digital strategies to protect and grow market share.

With seasonal demand spikes around events like Easter and Christmas adding another layer of complexity, Coles needed a way to anticipate shifts, react quickly, and ensure their paid search strategy captured demand before competitors.

Solution

Adthena provided Smith St. and Coles with intelligent data and competitor insights across their keyword portfolio, enabling the team to identify which product categories were growing, take action in real-time, and capture shoppers throughout their buying journey.

These insights were also integrated into a custom Looker dashboard, giving the paid media team a single source of truth to track market trends and optimize campaigns in real time. By aligning Adthena data with seasonal peaks, Coles maximized demand during critical trading periods like Easter and Christmas, while staying responsive to competitors year round.

With visibility into Woolworths and key competitors, Coles could allocate spend more strategically, protect its position, and adapt to Australia’s fast-changing grocery market.

Adthena has delivered meaningful, actionable insights into our paid search performance and competitor activity. By understanding category-level demand and market shifts, we’ve been able to strategize our paid search to gain an incremental share of voice. The ability to benchmark against peer-set quickly has been crucial in optimizing our keywords bidding strategy to be highly competitive vs competitors in the grocery vertical.

Van Tieu
OMD Australia
Digital Account Director