MPB wanted to move beyond volume-led paid search and prioritise customers with the highest long-term value. Croud helped connect MPB’s first-party CRM intelligence directly into Search Ads 360, enabling bidding strategies to reflect customer lifetime value rather than treating every conversion equally. The result was a 35% increase in ROAS and a 21% increase in Average Order Value, proving that first-party data could directly improve both media efficiency and revenue quality.
“By connecting our customer segmentation model directly to SA360, we managed to bridge the gap between our CRM insights and our media activation. This shift has enabled us to target customers with the highest long-term potential and drive substantially better business outcomes for MPB."
Patrick Williamson
VP of Performance Marketing, MPB
The Background & Challenge
MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video kit, partnered with Croud to accelerate growth by prioritising the acquisition of higher-value customers rather than optimising purely for conversion volume.
MPB held rich first-party revenue data within its CRM, including customer segmentation based on purchase behaviour and lifetime value. This intelligence showed that certain customer segments generated significantly greater long-term revenue for the business.
However, this insight was not informing paid media decision-making. Within paid search, all conversions were effectively treated as equal, meaning bidding strategies continued to prioritise volume rather than the long-term value of different customers.
This created a disconnect between MPB’s growth ambition and its media optimisation model. While demand remained strong, paid media investment was not prioritising the customers most likely to drive sustained commercial growth.
The challenge was therefore to translate MPB’s first-party intelligence into paid media in a way that prioritised high-value customers without increasing inefficiency, over-investing in lower-value demand, or sacrificing overall revenue growth.
Croud Intelligence
To support MPB’s ambition of prioritising high-value customers, Croud combined first-party CRM intelligence, paid search expertise and platform technology to understand how customer value was being represented within campaign optimisation.
The analysis revealed that growth was not constrained by demand, but by how conversion value was being signalled to bidding algorithms. Despite meaningful differences in lifetime value across customer segments, all conversions were being treated equally within campaign optimisation.
This meant paid search investment could not distinguish between lower-value customers and those most likely to generate significant long-term revenue.
To address this, Croud ran a first-party data workshop with MPB to map CRM customer segmentation and revenue signals into paid media decision-making.
Following this, MPB’s CRM revenue data was integrated directly into Search Ads 360, enabling bidding strategies to reflect the expected lifetime value of different customer segments.
By aligning bidding signals with true customer value, paid media investment could be reweighted towards higher-value audiences while maintaining efficiency. This shifted optimisation away from short-term conversion volume and towards long-term revenue quality.
The Return
Aligning paid search investment with first-party customer intelligence delivered measurable improvements in both efficiency and revenue quality.
A controlled test campaign running from July to September 2025 demonstrated the commercial impact of prioritising high-value customer segments compared with traditional volume-led optimisation.
The campaign delivered:
- Increasing ROAS by 35% by embedding CRM intelligence into paid search optimisation
- 21% increase in Average Order Value
Source: MPB CRM data and Search Ads 360
Further CRM analysis showed that customers acquired through the test campaign generated a higher total value of goods sold, confirming that aligning media decisions with true customer value improved both efficiency and long-term revenue potential.
This validated MPB’s strategy of prioritising high-value customers and demonstrated how first-party intelligence could directly improve the effectiveness of paid media investment.
Next Best Move
This work has fundamentally changed how MPB can use its first-party intelligence to guide media investment. By embedding customer lifetime value directly into paid search optimisation, MPB can now prioritise the acquisition of customers most likely to drive long-term value, rather than optimising solely for short-term conversions. This enables the team to distinguish between high-value and low-value customers at the point of acquisition and adjust bidding, targeting and budget allocation accordingly.
As a result, media investment is now directly aligned with the quality of customers being acquired, giving MPB clearer visibility into which audiences and channels contribute most to sustainable growth and allowing marketing decisions to be made with long-term business impact in mind.
