Sprzedaż w kwietniu wzrosła o 38%, zanim ruszyła pierwsza kampania
Sales in April rose by 38%, before the first campaign was launched.
The client came to us with an advertising budget and asked how to spend it. The answer was: not at all, for the time being. In its current state, the account would turn every zloty spent into a loss.
The challenge
Sales had stagnated for five quarters despite a growing market. The board of directors concluded that there was a lack of visibility and approved an advertising budget. The agency’s task was to spend it.
Advertising on Allegro acts as a lever: it boosts what’s already there. If a listing is in the wrong category, has incomplete details and a dispatch time set at five days, the advert buys impressions for it but hands clicks over to the competition. You then end up paying for traffic that converts for someone else.
About the client
A distributor of educational toys, with a catalogue of around 900 items; sales are mainly domestic.
An account that has been managed for six years by a single person who has since left the company, without passing on their knowledge or providing any documentation of the decisions made.
What we’ve done
The decisions that determined the outcome.
We have postponed the publication of the budget by one quarter
Instead of launching campaigns, we proposed an audit and three months’ work on the account. For the client, this meant reallocating the approved budget and having an awkward conversation with the board.
The argument that won us over: we calculated how much it would cost to drive traffic to offers with a five-day delivery time and without full product details. At the conversion rate at the time, this campaign would have returned around 1.40 zł for every złoty spent, whilst the break-even point in this category is around 3.50 zł.
We started with the things that nobody counts
The audit identified 41 issues. The most costly ones were not the obvious ones. 117 listings were placed in the wrong main category, which meant they did not appear in the filters used by most buyers in this sector.
Secondly: the dispatch time was set globally to five working days, even though the warehouse was actually dispatching orders within one. Someone had set the buffer six years earlier and nobody had reviewed it.
We fixed them in the order they were reported, not in order of ease
The list of 41 items was ranked according to their estimated impact on sales, not according to repair time. The top three items took a total of nine days and accounted for most of the subsequent increase.
We spread the remaining 38 items over the quarter. The customer fixed some of them themselves; they were given a list explaining what needed doing and why.
Course
Key stages.
- January 2026 Account audit Twelve days of analysis: categories, specifications, prices, logistics, quality indicators, and bid history.
- End of January 2026 A discussion on the budget reallocation Presentation of the cost estimates to the board. Decision to suspend the campaign for the quarter.
- February 2026 The three largest items Main categories, dispatch times, and adding details to the most promising categories.
- March 2026 The rest of the list Photographs, descriptions, variants, sets. Some of the work was handed over to the client’s team along with instructions.
- April 2026 Measurement and campaign launch A year-on-year comparison of results with a zero advertising budget. Only then were the adverts launched.
Results
Monthly sales with a zero advertising budget.
In both years, the advertising budget was zero. January 2026 was still part of the audit period; the first corrections were implemented in February.
What the audit revealed.
| Credits | January 2026 | April 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listings in the wrong main category | 117 | 0 | −117 |
| Stated dispatch time | 5 days | Day 1 | −4 days |
| Offers with a full set of specifications | 34% | 91% | +57 percentage points. |
| Conversion on the account | 2,1% | 2,9% | +0.8 percentage points. |
| Advertising expenditure | 0 zł | 0 zł | , |
How we did it.
The client came looking for a lever, but had no fulcrum for it. The audit identified 41 issues to be rectified, of which the first three accounted for the majority of the impact and took nine days to resolve. The most costly mistake – 117 adverts in the wrong category – required no investment at all, just an external review of the account. The campaigns went live a quarter later, on an account that was now in a position to handle them.
Repeatability
Why do we think it wasn’t a coincidence?.
Pre-investment assessment
Advertising boosts what’s already in place. With a track record of errors in categorisation and logistics, it buys traffic that ends up converting for the competition.
Ordered by impact, not ease
A list of errors ranked by estimated impact usually shows that the first few items account for the majority of the effect. The rest can either be dealt with later or passed on to the client.
Settings that nobody checks
The dispatch time buffer, an old category, a setting configured when the account was created. These are the cheapest to fix and the least frequently checked areas on any old account.
What this case does not prove: We are not saying that advertising is unnecessary. We are saying that it is premature on a disorganised account. After a quarter of tidying up, the same client launched campaigns, and it is these that are responsible for the growth in the second half of the year.
Do you know what cancels out the effect of advertising on your account?
We’ll review the categories, specifications, prices, logistics and quality indicators. You’ll receive a list of issues ranked by their impact on sales, along with information on what you can fix yourself.
Request an account audit
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