ZEISS wanted more people to find and book with the opticians that sell its lenses. The intent was already there. People searched for opticians every day, ready to book. ZEISS just wasn't the name in front of them when they did. Every search that didn't lead to a ZEISS partner was a customer handed to a competitor. Our job was to make ZEISS the first name people saw, and the one they trusted with their eyes.

The data showed a clear gap. Search demand for opticians was high and steady, but ZEISS was capturing only a fraction of it. People had the intent, but they didn't have ZEISS in view. 

We looked at where that intent was strongest and least contested. Branded searches converted well but reached few people. Generic optician and eye-condition searches reached far more, at a workable cost. That told us the opportunity wasn't to shout louder to existing fans, it was to intercept undecided searchers earlier, build trust through education and make a ZEISS optician the obvious choice. 

The data pointed one way, so we built one clear strategy: connect motivated searchers with opticians through ZEISS's Find My Optician tool. Clicks were never the goal, booked appointments at partner practices were.

That shaped three decisions. We went intent-led because the searches were already happening and interception cost less than creating demand. We invested in education because eye-condition and lens-technology searches showed people wanted to understand before they chose. And we measured against partner searches, because a search for an optician is the action that feeds the network. This eventually evolved following landing page tests away from searches to optical selections and appointment bookings.

We ran a standard keyword search campaign alongside Google's Performance Max. Search captured people with clear intent and Performance Max extended reach across display and other placements, with creative built to ZEISS brand guidelines. It became the engine of scale, and it delivered partner searches at one of the lowest costs in the account. 

The strategy did what it set out to do. It put ZEISS in front of people at the moment they were choosing, and it turned that visibility into action. 

Across the year, the campaigns drove more than 25,000 optician partner searches. We delivered that on 8 per cent less media spend than the year before, and brought the cost of each partner search down by 16 per cent. More results, less money. 

Better still, the quality held as the account scaled. More than one in five people who clicked went on to find a ZEISS partner through the Find My Optician tool, a conversion rate that stayed strong year on year rather than slipping as budgets stretched. 

The results built trust, and trust opened doors. What began as Google Ads management has grown into a broader partnership. We now run paid activity for ZEISS across Microsoft Ads, Reddit and Pinterest, with more channels being mapped into the yearly strategy, we manage larger budgets on their behalf and support their work with major high street retailers. The foundations we built in paid search earned the right to do more.