First Safety

Thousands of SKUs, two buyer types, and paid media that could not keep up

Online acquisition and catalogue performance needed optimisation across B2C and B2B. The business carries thousands of SKUs, and managing paid performance at that scale, across two distinct buyer types, was a constant headache. A range that large does not advertise itself. If the catalogue is unstructured in paid, Meta and Google will spend against whatever the feed and the account make easy, not against what First Safety actually needs to sell to consumers and to procurement teams.

Why a catalogue that size breaks ordinary ecommerce paid

Most consumer ecommerce paid setups assume a hero range, a short list of winners, and a remarketing pool. First Safety is not that business. Thousands of SKUs mean paid has to merchandise a catalogue, not a handful of products. Product feeds, titles, categories, and the way campaigns map to the range become the work. If that work is not done, budget concentrates on the SKUs that happen to have the cleanest signals, while the rest of the catalogue is invisible. In store, a customer can walk the aisles. Online, the aisle has to be built in Meta and Google, or it does not exist.

Scale is the headache Dave Evans named. Managing paid performance at that scale is not a bidding problem first. It is a catalogue problem first. Until the range is structured for B2C ecommerce and B2B procurement, optimisation is guesswork on top of a messy map.

B2C and B2B in the same store, pulling in different directions

B2C and B2B procurement do not share a funnel, even when they share a catalogue. A consumer click and a procurement click can land on the same product and still be different jobs. Average order value, repeat behaviour, and the creative that earns the click will not match. If paid treats them as one audience, the account will usually overfit to whichever motion is noisier. First Safety needed both. Online acquisition had to work for shoppers and for procurement buyers. Catalogue performance had to make sense of the range for both, not only for the side of the business that looked more like standard ecommerce.

The operational challenge was a single agency that understood both sides. First Safety did not need a consumer specialist and a separate B2B story. It needed one team covering Meta and Google, with a catalogue strategy that finally made sense of thousands of SKUs across B2C ecommerce and B2B procurement. Until that existed, paid performance at that scale stayed a constant headache, and the strong in-store reputation could not be relied on to carry the online channel.

Stated plainly: the challenge was catalogue-scale paid media for an Australian ecommerce brand selling to two buyer types, on Meta and Google, without a strategy that made the range legible to either platform or to the business.

A catalogue-heavy Australian brand selling to shoppers and procurement teams

First Safety is a leading Australian ecommerce brand with a strong in-store reputation and a catalogue-heavy range sold to both B2C customers and B2B procurement buyers. The business carries thousands of SKUs. That is not a merchandising detail. It is the commercial condition of the company. Online, those thousands of SKUs have to be found, understood, and bought by two very different buyers, often through the same store and the same paid platforms.

The B2C shopper and the B2B procurement buyer do not arrive with the same intent. One is buying for a job, a home, or a one-off need. The other is buying against a spec, a repeat order, or an account relationship. First Safety already knew how to serve both in store. Online acquisition and catalogue performance had not caught up to that reality. The range was large enough to be a strength in person and a headache in paid media if the catalogue was not structured for how Meta and Google actually deliver products to a click.

Two buyers, one catalogue

A catalogue-heavy Australian ecommerce business cannot treat B2C and B2B as a single paid audience with a single product feed and a single definition of a good order. Average order value, the path to purchase, and the creative that earns a click are different when the buyer is a consumer and when the buyer is procuring. First Safety needed a partner who understood both sides of the business, not an agency that could only run consumer ecommerce ads and hope procurement would tag along.

The customer in this engagement is First Safety. The thumbnail on this case study is an image file and is not the client. The work sat on Meta and Google, against a catalogue of thousands of SKUs, for a brand that already had a strong in-store reputation and needed the online channel to perform for both B2C ecommerce and B2B procurement.

What First Safety already had, and what it still needed

In-store reputation is an asset. It is not a paid media strategy. Thousands of SKUs are an asset. They are not a catalogue strategy. First Safety had both, and still had a constant headache managing paid performance at that scale. The business needed online acquisition and catalogue performance optimised across B2C and B2B, with a single team that could hold both motions without flattening them into one consumer campaign.

That is the customer Segments was hired to serve: an Australian, catalogue-heavy ecommerce brand selling to shoppers and procurement buyers, needing Meta and Google to make sense of a range that large, without losing the commercial distinction between the two sides of the business.

167% increase in orders and AOV, with CAC down and AOV up

First Safety recorded a 167% increase in orders and improvements in AOV. Catalogue-led paid performance is now structured across B2C and B2B, with CAC down and AOV up. Those are the published commercial results of the engagement. They sit on Meta and Google, against a catalogue of thousands of SKUs, for both the B2C ecommerce channel and B2B procurement buyers.

How results were measured

The headline result is the 167% increase in orders and improvements in AOV. Alongside that, customer acquisition cost came down and average order value went up. No other percentage is claimed. The commercial read is that First Safety is taking more orders, at a stronger average order value, while paying less to acquire, with paid performance structured across both sides of the business rather than fitted to one of them.

That pairing matters for a catalogue-heavy brand. More orders at a weaker basket is not the same business. More AOV on fewer orders is not the same business. First Safety moved orders and AOV together, with CAC down. Catalogue strategy is what made that possible at thousands of SKUs. Meta and Google are where it was delivered.

What it meant operationally

Operationally, paid performance at catalogue scale stopped being a constant headache. The range is structured for B2C and B2B. A single agency covers both sides of the business. CAC is down. AOV is up. Orders and average order value are up 167%. That is the operating change Dave Evans described, and it is the result Segments was hired to produce.

We carry thousands of SKUs and managing paid performance at that scale was a constant headache. Segments built a catalogue strategy that finally made sense of it across both our B2C ecomm channel and B2B procurement buyers, CAC is down, AOV is up, and for the first time we have a single agency that understands both sides of our business.

Dave Evans, CEO, First Safety

The client is First Safety. The work was paid Meta and Google against a catalogue-heavy Australian ecommerce range, for B2C and B2B procurement. The published result is a 167% increase in orders and AOV, with CAC down and AOV up, and a catalogue strategy both sides of the business can finally run.

A catalogue strategy on Meta and Google, for both sides of the business

Segments ran paid Meta and Google for First Safety and built a catalogue strategy that made sense of the range across the B2C ecommerce channel and B2B procurement buyers, with a single team covering both sides of the business. Paid delivery was the visible work. Catalogue structure was the work that made delivery possible. Thousands of SKUs cannot be managed as a pile of ads. They have to be organised as a range that Meta and Google can actually serve, and that B2C and B2B buyers can actually find.

Making the catalogue legible to paid media

The catalogue strategy started with how the range is grouped, named, and fed into Meta and Google. At thousands of SKUs, campaign structure is a merchandising decision. Which products are prospected. Which are merchandised to people already in market. How B2C and B2B are held apart when they share a catalogue. How a product that matters to procurement is not lost inside a consumer-optimised feed. Segments built that map so paid performance could be managed at the scale First Safety actually operates, rather than at the scale of a short hero range.

Catalogue-led paid is different from brand-led paid. Creative still matters. Feeds, titles, categories, and the way products are clustered matter more. If the range is wrong in the account, no amount of bidding skill will find the SKUs a procurement buyer needs, or present the range a B2C shopper can browse. The strategy was to make the catalogue the organising idea of the Meta and Google program, then run acquisition against that structure for both buyer types.

B2C ecommerce and B2B procurement as parallel motions

B2C and B2B were not collapsed into one consumer campaign. The B2C ecommerce channel needed paid that could acquire shoppers against a wide range. B2B procurement buyers needed paid that respected how they buy: spec, repeat, account, and a different relationship to average order value. A single team covered both so the catalogue strategy stayed coherent. First Safety did not have to brief one agency on shoppers and another on procurement. Segments held both motions inside the same Meta and Google program, with the catalogue as the shared source of truth.

That is what it means to understand both sides of the business. It is not a slogan. It is campaign structure, creative briefs, and optimisation rules that do not force procurement to behave like a consumer, or consumers to behave like an account. The headache of thousands of SKUs gets lighter when the range is structured. It does not get lighter when the same ad is asked to do both jobs.

How Meta and Google were run against the range

Meta and Google were the paid platforms. They were not treated as interchangeable. Google is where catalogue intent can be captured: people looking for a product, a category, or a spec. Meta is where the range can be merchandised and where demand can be created for products a shopper would not have searched. Together they are how a catalogue-heavy Australian ecommerce brand gets found online. Segments ran both against the catalogue strategy, so acquisition and merchandising had a place to live, and so B2C and B2B could be seen inside the same paid system.

Day to day, that meant a program First Safety could operate at catalogue scale: Meta and Google structured around the range, a single team covering B2C ecommerce and B2B procurement, and paid performance that could finally be managed without treating thousands of SKUs as a constant headache. The solution is that system. The result is what the system produced.