CASE STUDY
Stella Rising Recovers Over $114,000 Across Search Spend
Integrating the intelligent optimization platform into their holistic search methodology allowed the agency to deploy floor rates on uncontested traffic, unlocking massive efficiencies for high-growth consumer brands.
Objectives:
- Reduce Ad Cost
- Maintain Ad Performance
- Create Growth Budget
Challenge: Escalating Portfolio Acquisition Costs
Stella Rising manages a diverse portfolio of high-growth brands facing rising click costs and aggressive retail competition. Historically, siloed marketing efforts between paid media and SEO inhibited organic conversions and drove up acquisition costs. The agency observed that static bidding requirements forced clients to overpay on branded search queries just to maintain visibility against market threats.
Rising auction premiums meant client budgets were increasingly consuming funding year-over-year baseline operations, restricting the capital available for new customer acquisition. The introduction of Performance Max compounded the issue, since branded ads could serve improperly if a keyword wasn't actively targeted within a search campaign, threatening the integrity of the overarching strategy. The agency needed a unified framework to optimize branded search efficiency and redirect paid investment toward sustainable audience growth.
Results
- Over $114,000 in combined reclaimed ad spend across two featured client accounts
- Successfully blocked Performance Max from entering branded auctions within Search placements for a clean cosmetics brand
- Lowered overall CPC by 22% for a national dental distributor
- Unlocked new marketing capital to fuel direct-to-consumer acquisition and holistic revenue growth
Solution: Intelligent Auction Filtering
Stella Rising deployed AdAi across two client accounts to monitor auction competition in real time, adjust bids accordingly, and block Performance Max from entering branded auctions, all while maintaining strategic control.
Contested Auctions: When competitors bid aggressively, AdAi maintained the bids needed to protect visibility.
Uncontested Auctions: When no competitive threat existed, AdAi lowered bids to reduce unnecessary spend.
Results varied by account based on specific auction conditions. Across the board, this strategic deployment caused click costs to plummet immediately, with floor CPCs dropping to a fraction of their historical baselines.
Results: Fueling Holistic Revenue Growth
Deploying this data-driven performance strategy filled the gaps in search and delivered a cleaner, leaner CPA across the agency's portfolio.
For the clean cosmetics brand, Stella Rising reclaimed $37,630 in ad spend. The AdAi-managed campaign captured 22,139 clicks at an average CPC of $0.08, compared with $2.67 for the brand's standard campaign, driving 4,706 conversions while maintaining a 36.3% CTR.
For the national dental distributor, Stella Rising reclaimed more than $76,500 in ad spend since March 2024. AdAi's 22% reduction in overall CPC enabled the agency to build larger audience lists for remarketing and lookalike targeting. This unified approach produced an 11.6% increase in total holistic clicks and drove 19% year-over-year holistic revenue growth, culminating in a six-figure organic and paid revenue surge during a single month.
Across both accounts, Stella Rising reinvested the reclaimed budget into new customer acquisition efforts across search and social channels.
Conclusion: Sustainable Search Growth
Operating as an autonomous Agentic AI, AdAi continuously reclaims budget while ensuring core branded campaign assets remain active.
Stella Rising transformed static defensive bidding into an optimized growth engine, allowing their portfolio of brands to scale profitably and compete in search without sacrificing strategic control.
"Brand search shouldn’t be a tax our clients pay just to stay visible. AdAi let us tell the difference between auctions that need defending and auctions that don’t, so we protect the brand when competitors show up and stop overpaying when they don’t. The budget we reclaimed went straight into new customer acquisition, which is where it belongs." - Jess Ortiz, VP of SEM, Stella Rising