Treatwell: Creating a beautiful new ads management system

Discover how Softwire crafted a bespoke PPC management platform to help Treatwell maintain more than 1.5 million online ads.

The Challenge

Help Treatwell grow its business by automating the creation and management of more than 1.5 million bespoke PPC ads

Treatwell helps people find and book beauty treatments in their local area. It’s the largest website of its kind in Europe, and works with more than 20,000 partner salons.

A large part of its business is built around pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising with Google AdWords. Treatwell uses this platform to promote its partners when someone searches for a particular treatment.

Its PPC operation is enormous, with more than 1.5 million unique adverts and close to 40 million keywords to manage. It had long done this using a sophisticated but manual and time-consuming system of rules and spreadsheets.

To grow its business and free up its ad management teams to focus on higher-value work, Treatwell wanted to modernise and automate this part of its operations.

Our Solution

Our discovery process shaped new ways of working and enabled us to design and deliver a future-proof system that bridges the gap between Treatwell’s databases and Google AdWords

To help shape Treatwell’s new AdWords management process and supporting system, we ran a discovery with its technical and ad management teams. We helped outline new ways of working, then came up with a range of proposals for systems to support these.

The unique nature of Treatwell’s data and rules meant an off-the-shelf system would require huge customisation, and even then, was unlikely to fully align with the way it wanted to work. Bespoke was therefore the way to go.

The new software needed to bring in data from Treatwell’s salon and treatment databases. It then required a sophisticated rules engine that used this data to auto-generate adverts, based on the teams’ instructions. The final piece in the jigsaw was then to publish PPC adverts to Google. The system also needed to be future-proof and extensible, able to handle ever-larger ad volumes and new features.

Working closely with Treatwell throughout, we developed a prototype, then built out and refined its capabilities, until Treatwell had a fully featured, production-ready system that sat seamlessly between its databases and Google.

The Result

Our PPC manager has transformed the productivity of Treatwell’s teams and unlocked new revenue streams for the business

Our approach of creating a prototype that Treatwell could use as we were developing it had two big advantages. Firstly, it meant the teams benefited from the new features early in the process. Secondly, it meant the system’s users played an integral role in shaping its capabilities, informed by actually using the evolving software day-to-day.

The result is a robust system that genuinely supports the teams’ activities. By automating previously manual processes, it’s enabling the same individuals to handle more adverts and spend longer on higher-value analysis and strategic work.

Moreover, our PPC manager is enabling Treatwell to unlock additional revenue streams that were previously uneconomical. For example, it’s now able to target its audiences in new ways, including through large-scale venue- and treatment-specific campaigns.