Are You Leveraging AI-Driven Performance Max for Inbound ROI Growth?
The digital marketing landscape is rapidly evolving in 2025, with AI-driven automation and performance marketing at the core of the industry. Faced with a fragmented consumer journey, brands need innovative tools to break down the barriers between off-site traffic and on-site conversions. Google's AI-driven Maximize Performance campaigns are key to achieving this goal, boosting the value of Inbound marketing through a unified, cross-channel strategy. Despite fierce competition, haircare e-commerce brand Rough99 and Taiwan's leading online retail platform PChome 24 Shopping have achieved significant business growth by deeply integrating their campaigns with Google Retail Connect (GRC). This demonstrates the crucial role of AI optimization, targeted targeting, and seamless data analysis in driving marketing performance. This article will analyze the specific strategies of these two companies and compare their approaches, offering practical advice for brands and platforms hoping to replicate similar success. It will also explore key drivers of marketing performance, such as budget flexibility and real-time optimization, and the future of performance marketing in retail and e-commerce.
1. Leveraging Performance Max for Haircare E-Commerce
Rough99, a Taiwanese haircare e-commerce brand, faced fierce competition in the beauty market, where product differentiation alone was no longer enough to sustain growth. The brand recognized that driving high-quality Inbound off-site traffic to its Shopee store was critical to breaking through performance plateaus—this focus on targeted Inbound traffic aimed to attract users already showing intent toward haircare solutions, rather than generic outreach. To achieve this, Rough99 turned to Performance Max campaigns, leveraging AI-driven optimization to enhance both reach and conversion efficiency for its Inbound marketing efforts.
One of the core challenges Rough99 addressed was balancing advertising volume with effectiveness. The brand adopted a Target ROI bidding strategy, allowing Google’s AI to dynamically adjust bids based on real-time conversion data. This ensured optimal cost efficiency while maximizing revenue. Additionally, Rough99 incorporated precise audience signals, including Google’s engaged audience lists and search topic targeting, to accelerate AI learning and improve ad relevance. By feeding the algorithm with high-intent customer segments, the brand reduced wasted impressions and increased click-through rates.
Creative asset integration is another key factor in Rough99's success. The brand provides a comprehensive portfolio of product feeds, high-quality images, and video assets in various formats, enabling the system to automatically select the best-performing creative content for different audiences and delivery scenarios. This flexibility ensures consistent performance across channels such as YouTube, display ads, and the search network, ultimately achieving significant results: a 5x increase in conversion rate, a 35% reduction in cost-per-click (CPC), and sustained double-digit monthly revenue growth. Rough99's case study fully demonstrates that Performance Max campaigns can connect off-site traffic with on-site sales, creating a seamless marketing funnel from brand discovery to completed purchase.
2. Enhancing Brand Flagship Store Performance
Amidst shrinking advertising budgets and increasingly competitive industry conditions, PChome 24 Shopping, Taiwan's leading e-commerce platform, was under immense pressure to achieve measurable performance targets for its flagship store. By strategically adopting Performance Max campaigns and integrating them with Google Retail Connect (GRC), the platform successfully addressed two core challenges: data fragmentation and cross-channel attribution difficulties—key pain points hindering effective Inbound marketing performance.
2.1 Addressing Data Blindness with GRC Integration
Before implementing GRC, PChome's brand partners struggled to link off-site advertising performance with on-site conversions—traditional shopping ads offered limited visibility into their impact on downstream sales. By implementing GRC, PChome achieved real-time conversion tracking within Google Ads, enabling brands to accurately attribute sales to specific campaigns and dynamically adjust bids. For example, in a closed test involving 12 brands in the healthcare and electronics sectors, GRC-driven campaigns not only achieved an 80%-100% higher return on ad spend than standard shopping ads, but also outperformed other retail media partnerships by 50%. This data transparency allows brands to reallocate budgets to high-intent audiences without disrupting existing account structures.
Topkee's expertise is similar to its GRC data integration capabilities. Its Time-to-Market (TTO) tool provides companies with end-to-end monitoring of advertising channels and creative performance, ensuring that marketing investments in Inbound initiatives are aligned with business objectives.
2.2 Leveraging Retail-Specific Audience Signals
PChome leverages AI technology in its Maximizing Performance campaigns to target users based on first-party retail data (such as past purchasers, cart abandoners, and product page visitors), enabling precise audience expansion. AI continuously learns and optimizes based on these signals, driving incremental sales without increasing customer acquisition costs (CAC). Notably, campaigns targeting high-value customer segments (such as repeat purchasers of high-end electronics) have seen returns on advertising spend increase by up to 300%.
Topkee's advertising operations team excels at KPI-driven audience segmentation and uses advanced, goal-oriented bidding strategies to maximize revenue. This approach aligns closely with successful framework, providing brands with professional support in performance marketing that aligns with industry success stories, helping to optimize campaign effectiveness and overall revenue.
2.3 Platform-focused creative optimization
Unlike Rough99's focus on product-focused creative libraries, PChome's strategy emphasizes unified messaging across multi-brand campaigns. Maximizing campaigns automatically select the optimal creative format (for example, video ads for YouTube and static banners for the display network) while ensuring consistency with the flagship store landing page. This approach creates a coherent brand experience throughout the user journey from brand discovery to purchase.
Topkee's Solution: Tools like YIS streamline cross-channel creative management, helping brands produce and deliver customized social content at scale—a strategy that aligns perfectly with PChome's focus on adaptive creative workflows. Topkee's YIS tool streamlines cross-channel creative management, helping brands produce and deliver customized social content at scale—a move that aligns perfectly with PChome's focus on adaptive creative workflows for Inbound success.
By combining retail media infrastructure with AI-driven automation, PChome has successfully transformed its flagship stores into a growth engine, setting a benchmark for platform-advertiser collaboration in the post-cookie era.
3. Common Success Factors and Unique Adaptations
Although Rough99 (a product-based brand) and PChome 24 Shopping (a platform-based company) operate in different scenarios, they share common strategies for success in applying Performance Max campaigns:
First, both rely heavily on AI-driven audience targeting, leveraging first-party data to optimize Google's algorithms. Rough99 uses active audience lists and search topics, while PChome leverages retail-specific signals like past purchasers and cart abandoners to precisely reach high-intent consumers and reduce wasted spend.
Second, both companies integrate creative across multiple channels. Rough99 leverages its extensive creative library to deliver customized ads across channels like YouTube and display ads, while PChome connects off-site advertising with on-site pages through unified messaging. Both companies rely on AI to dynamically select the optimal creative for optimal results. The execution differences between the two platforms are also significant: Rough99 focuses on driving traffic to Shopee stores, prioritizing lower-funnel conversions with target ROI bidding; PChome, on the other hand, must balance the performance of multiple brands, balancing broad reach with personalized tracking. Through GRC, it highlights the critical role of retail media networks (RMNs) in bridging the data gap between brands and platforms.
These differences offer clear implications for businesses: product brands can emulate Rough99's "precise audience signals + flexible budgeting" model, while platforms can look to PChome's "transparent data-driven partnership" approach. The core logic is this: Optimizing advertising effectiveness requires adapting to specific business models, and only through deep integration with first-party data analysis and cross-channel creative strategies can its full potential be realized.
4. Future Impact and Best Practices
The breakthroughs achieved by Rough99 and PChome 24 Shopping highlight a paradigm shift in performance marketing. AI-driven automation and first-party data integration have gone from optional to mandatory. As the consumer journey becomes increasingly segmented, tools like Performance Maximized campaigns and Google Retail Connect are key to unifying cross-channel strategies and maintaining ROI visibility. As third-party cookies are phased out, leveraging first-party data becomes crucial. As third-party cookies are phased out, leveraging first-party data becomes crucial. PChome leverages GRC to implement real-time conversion tracking and audience expansion to fill data gaps, while Rough99 provides high-intent graph signals to its algorithms and maintains creative diversity. Both companies leverage a rich creative library to power AI-driven campaigns, achieving a 35% reduction in cost-per-click and a 300% increase in return on ad spend, respectively. Looking ahead, predictive analytics will be at the forefront of performance marketing. Platforms and brands that integrate Performance Max automation with powerful data collaboration will lead in omnichannel experience optimization.
Topkee offers a variety of services to help companies optimize their marketing, including an omnichannel attribution platform that measures cross-channel effectiveness, aligns ad spend with business goals, and ensures data transparency; professional advertising operations services that optimize campaigns through "test and learn," laying the foundation for expanding AI-powered results; tools that simplify multi-platform content creation and A/B testing, ensuring creatives meet AI-powered personalization requirements; tools that seamlessly integrate websites and social media, ensuring smooth data flow; and an integrated chat-based CRM system that connects off-site advertising with on-site engagement, enhancing the cohesion of the marketing funnel.
Conclusion
The cases of Rough99 and PChome 24 Shopping demonstrate the transformative power of Maximize Performance campaigns, combined with strategic integration and cross-channel execution, highlighting how AI-driven marketing can transform competitive challenges into growth opportunities. Whether you're a brand seeking to increase e-commerce sales or a platform aiming to enhance partner performance, the key lies in leveraging automation, first-party data, and collaborative retail media tools. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, staying ahead requires constant adaptation; if you're ready to explore how Maximize Performance campaigns can boost your Inbound ROI, consult with Topkee's experts to customize a strategy for your business. The future of performance marketing is here; embrace it with confidence.
