Meet the Client: A German Luxury Fashion Label With Global Reach

Dorothee Schumacher is a German luxury contemporary fashion label, known for directional, statement-led womenswear sold across boutiques and department stores globally. The brand competes in a category where acquisition costs climb every peak season and long-term customer value determines profitability. Its paid search account was already mature when Crealytics came on board: Performance Max campaigns were live, the product feed was in good shape, and Search was running alongside Shopping inventory.

The brief was to sustain revenue growth and efficiency under reduced budgets, while protecting brand visibility and limiting competitor gains in impression share. The account's existing structure was the starting point: the work was about extracting more value from what was already in place.

The Growth Challenge: Performance Max Was Optimizing for the Wrong Conversions

Performance Max optimizes toward conversion value, and in a retail account with a strong brand and a large base of returning customers, the most cost-effective conversions are usually repeat purchases. The campaign looked efficient on paper, but a meaningful share of its spend was going toward customers who would have converted anyway. For a luxury brand where margin depends on acquiring new buyers and retaining them over time, that pattern creates a gap between reported performance and commercial progress.

The account also lacked the audience depth and structural precision that a brand like Dorothee Schumacher requires. PMax by default treats all traffic as a single blended pool, which loses the nuance a brand needs when it is reaching across markets, collections, and distinct consumer segments. Budget was cycling through broad audiences without the signal layers that would let the machine learning surface the highest-value users more consistently.

Crealytics set out to change both the signal and the structure, with efficiency guardrails in place to keep the account commercially grounded as the audience scope expanded.

The Strategy: Signal Depth, Structural Precision, and a Planned Creative Cadence

Layering audience signals into every Performance Max campaign

Crealytics built a layered audience architecture into each PMax campaign, moving well beyond the broad signal PMax uses by default. First-party remarketing lists covered cart abandoners, all-site visitors, and past purchasers. YouTube engagement audiences were added, including a bespoke vegan-ads segment reflecting the brand's values and customer positioning. Fashion and luxury in-market and affinity audiences (Apparel and Accessories, Luxury Fashion Buyers, Fashionistas) were layered in alongside granular market-specific segments and custom search-intent audiences built around fashion brand, competitor, and marketplace terms.

This architecture gave PMax's machine learning the signal it needed to prioritize high-intent users while still testing incremental demand pockets, moving the system away from defaulting to the most accessible conversions in the account.

Organizing campaigns around collection and season for tighter creative alignment

Campaign structure was reorganized by collection and seasonal moment, Fall/Winter and Summer, keeping creative and messaging tightly aligned with what was live in-store at any given time. Each campaign also included a deliberately empty asset group as a fallback, preserving Shopping inventory presence even when tailored creative was not eligible to serve.

Bidding ran on a Target ROAS basis throughout, giving the team a consistent efficiency lever to adjust as budgets shifted across the year. Non-Brand Search campaigns ran in parallel, with additional search themes layered in to sharpen placement targeting.

Running creative on a planned refresh cadence

Creative was managed on a considered, pre-planned schedule. Core creative sets ran for four to six weeks, select images were refreshed every two weeks to keep the feed feeling current, and sale messaging was updated every three weeks around the brand's two major sale periods. This discipline kept the account's creative relevant without introducing the volatility that comes from frequent unplanned changes.

Results: Higher Revenue, Lower Cost, and Efficiency That Compounded Into 2026

The strategy delivered across every metric that mattered. Figures compare the 2025 performance period against the prior year baseline.

Revenue and efficiency

· Revenue increased 6% year-over-year at 45% lower cost.

· Conversion rate increased 77% year-over-year.

· Click-through rate doubled year-over-year.

Non-brand performance

· Non-brand spend was reduced almost by half while ROAS nearly doubled, from 5.7 to 11.

2026 momentum

· From January to July 2026, ROAS reached 14.7, a 68% year-over-year increase, with spend down 8% and conversion rate up 43%.

The 2026 trajectory is the result worth examining closely. Efficiency gains of this kind often level off as an account matures. Dorothee Schumacher's numbers continued to improve under a tighter budget, a sign that the audience signal depth and structural discipline built in 2025 created a foundation with compounding returns.

Lessons Learned: What Senior Leaders Can Apply to Their Own Accounts

1. Audience signal depth determines what PMax optimizes toward

Performance Max follows the value signals it receives. Without layered first-party and intent-based audiences, the system defaults to the easiest conversions available, typically existing customers and high-familiarity traffic. Building signal depth into the campaign architecture is what allows machine learning to find higher-value users more consistently.

2. Campaign structure should reflect the commercial calendar

Organizing campaigns by collection and season keeps creative and messaging aligned with actual trading moments. That alignment improves relevance scores, reduces wasted impressions, and gives the account a cleaner read on what is working at each point in the year.

3. Creative discipline reduces volatility

A planned refresh cadence gives PMax's learning systems stability while keeping the feed current. Frequent unplanned changes reset the algorithm's progress and produce noisy performance data that is harder to act on.

4. Efficiency guardrails allow smarter risk-taking

Running on a Target ROAS basis throughout gave the team a single lever to manage efficiency as budgets changed. That guardrail made it possible to invest in audience expansion and creative testing without losing control of the account's commercial output.

5. Plan for performance to compound, not plateau

The Dorothee Schumacher results through 2026 demonstrate that a well-constructed PMax setup continues to improve as the machine learning accumulates signal from better-quality audiences. The investment in structure and audience depth in year one creates returns that extend well beyond it.

Crealytics was awarded Gold Winner for the NY Digital Awards 2026 for Best SEM Campaign for this success with Dorothee Schumacher.

Relevant Insights

· Case study: PMax New Customer Optimization Case Study: Higher New Customer Share for a Global Fashion Retailer

· Case Study: How Crealytics’ Award-Recognized AI Innovation Is Transforming Paid Media

· Case Study: Holiday Season Success: How We Delivered 65% Higher Revenue with 24% Less Budget for a Leading Fashion Brand

About Crealytics

Crealytics is an award-winning full-funnel digital marketing agency fueling the profitable growth of over 100 well-known B2C and B2B businesses, including ASOS, The Hut Group, Staples and Urban Outfitters. A global company with an inclusive team of 100+ international employees, we operate from our hubs in Berlin, New York, Chicago, London, and Mumbai.