The revenue climbed. I assumed we'd spent our way there. We hadn't.

A home & living brand I look after — they sell adjustable beds and mobility furniture — had a good week on one of their marketplaces. Revenue on the channel ticked up, day after day, clearly above the usual line.

My first instinct was the obvious one. We must have spent more. Someone pushed budget, or a campaign slipped its leash, and the extra sales were simply bought. So I opened the platform's ad console expecting to find a spike.

There wasn't one. Daily ad spend was flat — the same modest few tens of euros a day it had been for weeks. If anything we were spending less than the plan allowed.

That's the part worth sitting with. The lever I reached for first — more money — wasn't the one that had moved anything.

Where the lift actually came from

When I stopped looking at spend and started looking at efficiency, the picture resolved. A few weeks earlier the team had restructured the keywords on the sponsored-product ads: trimmed the lazy automatic matching, put deliberate terms in, split the campaigns by intent. That change was doing the work. The same budget was landing on better queries.

On top of that, one product variant was quietly surging on its own demand — and, the bit I like most, with no discounting at all. Nobody had bought the growth with a promo. The return on what we were spending sat comfortably several times its cost, well above any floor I'd set for the channel.

And here's the figure that actually matters for planning: only about a sixth of the available ad budget was being used. Five-sixths of a profitable channel was sitting idle.

There's a line Gary Keller quotes in The One Thing, from the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke: "The things that are most important aren't always the ones that shout loudest." More budget shouts loudest. It's almost never the thing that matters most.

Why the marketplace ad rails deserve more attention than they get

This isn't a niche corner. Retail media — the ads that run on marketplaces and retailers' own sites — is the fastest-growing slice of digital advertising. eMarketer expects it to reach roughly a sixth of all global ad spend in 2026 and to overtake television that year. The channel keeps compounding while a large share of advertisers leave their spend flat. The German marketplace we were on grew its own ad revenue 49% in its last fiscal year, and only introduced manual keyword control in August 2025. European retail media grew 22.1% in 2024 against 6.1% for advertising overall. These rails are improving faster than most brands are learning to use them.

Which is exactly why the "just spend more" reflex is so wrong here. The bottleneck on a channel like this is rarely the budget. It's the structure — the keywords, the product data, which variant you push, whether the listing earns the click it's paying for. Get those right and the same money does more. Get them wrong and more money just loses faster.

The reflex is the tell

I've argued before that in this kind of work, the leverage is the judgement, not the tool. This was a small, live reminder that the judgement includes noticing your own reflex. Twenty years in, I still reached for the spend dial first. The only difference that matters is I checked before I pulled it.

Someone without the reps sees the revenue line climb, opens the ad account, and raises the budget — because that's the lever that's easiest to find and feels the most like action. Sometimes it even works for a week. But look properly and you'd have found a profitable channel begging for structure, not cash, and a product that was already winning on its own.

The honest version isn't "I grew the channel." It's "the channel was growing, I nearly took credit by spending, and the real job was to notice why — then pour effort, not budget, into the part that was working." On a marketplace especially, buyers behave differently than they do on your own site, and the ad system rewards relevance over spend.

Home and furniture makes the point sharper still. It's a category where people take weeks to decide, so an ad that puts the right product in front of the right query at the right moment is worth far more than one that simply outbids the brand next to it. The lever was never the money.

Spend was the loudest option on the page. It was also the wrong one.

Sources & further reading

External
PPC Land — OTTO Advertising posts 49% retail media growth after DSP and keyword-targeting push
eMarketer — Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast, H1 2026
Gary Keller & Jay Papasan, The One Thing (Bob Hawke, quoted).

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