Nala Health

Nala Health is a family-run dog food company based in South Africa but also selling in Norway with a very unique twist: insect protein instead of the usual, chicken.

They approached me in December of 2023, with a critical problem, their tracking was all over the place: double, even triple the conversions being reported, sometimes none. They couldn’t figure out where to invest their marketing budget. In Norway, GDPR compliance was not working as it should.

After I fixed tracking, the real problem surfaced: Google Ads was not being as effective as the platform showed, they needed someone to make it work.

The problem was so deep that a few patches wouldn’t solve it. We decided to start from scratch.

I manually added tags, variables and GTM/Cookiebot cookie consent integration and ran a bunch of tests to make sure we had everything reporting correctly. When the new GTM was finally live the results were clear: no more over reporting. More precise tracking, more clarity for business decisions.

And with that clarity came the second problem: Google Ads was very, very wrong with its numbers. It looked good on the surface: steady, strong results but in reality they were inflated.

They asked me to work on it, this is what I did:

Created new search campaigns with the best undervalued keywords.

There were some keywords like “chicken-free dog food” and “hypoallergenic dog food” that are exactly what their ideal customer wants but were not to be seen in the previous campaigns.

Measurable result: Lower Cost per acquisition

Re-optimized the product feed and Google Shopping campaign.

Changed their feed product names and description from branded-first to benefit-first. It would be very hard to compete against billion-dollar companies in the “dog food” keyword space, so I decided to add benefit keywords there, so people looking for “gut health”, “sensitive skin” for example, would find their product.

Measurable result: Higher value customers with the right intent

Expanded the best keyword-based search ad groups into their own campaigns.

Once I got enough data to work with, I started creating dedicated campaigns (and asked them for a dedicated landing page) for top-performing keywords. This strategy is a great way to keep the ad -> landing page congruency/relevancy very high, leading to higher conversion rates.

Measurable result: Higher CTR and CVR for high-intent keywords

South Africa’s Year-over-year orders grew 280% in year one and 31% in year two, compounding growth built on a clean data foundation.

In Norway, they saw 122% order growth in year one and 42% in year two, with a working GDPR-compliant tracking in place.

Today, more than 40% of sales are attributed, correctly, to Google Ads, giving the team confidence to make smarter budget decisions for the first time.