Running Search campaigns for a large product catalog sounds straightforward. Until the account grows so big it becomes impossible to manage. Boataround reached a point where their campaign structure was working against them. Sync times stretched to hours and Smart Bidding was struggling to learn.
Dotidot solved this with a new approach to Search campaign structure: One that consolidates ad groups at scale while making sure every single keyword still points to the correct product page.
Boataround was founded in 2016 with a simple idea: renting a boat should be as easy as booking a hotel room. The company was started by Jana Escher and Pavel Pribiš, both former employees of Booking.com, who wanted to bring the same transparency and simplicity to the boat rental market. Today, Boataround operates in 72 countries and manages one of the largest inventories of sailboats, motorboats, and catamarans available for charter worldwide. Starting from a single contract for 17 vessels at a Croatian resort, the company has grown into the number two boat rental operator in Europe and one of the top five platforms in the world. With an inventory spanning thousands of unique listings across dozens of destinations, managing product-level Search campaigns at scale is not just a technical challenge.
Large e-commerce and inventory-based advertisers using Search campaigns in Dotidot traditionally follow a 1 product = 1 ad group structure. It gives full control and precise ad copy, but as catalogs grow, it creates a compounding problem.
Boataround were dealing with all three consequences at once. Their account had grown to a point where the sheer number of ad groups was approaching Google's hard limit of around 20,000 per campaign. Any change to the account took hours to sync, making real-time optimization nearly impossible. And with thousands of ad groups each collecting their own conversion data, most individual ad groups never accumulated enough conversions for Smart Bidding to learn properly, leaving performance fragmented and unpredictable across the long tail of the catalog.
As Boataround put it directly: accounts with hundreds of thousands of ad groups are impossible to handle. The data is so fragmented that Smart Bidding simply cannot do its job.
The core problem with consolidation has always been a simple one: if you group multiple products into a single ad group, all their keywords point to the same landing page. For an inventory-based business like Boataround, sending a user searching for a specific boat in a specific location to a generic page is not acceptable.
Dotidot's new keyword-level Final URL support solved this directly. Products are grouped into shared ad groups based on a feed attribute: category, destination, or a custom grouping field. Each individual keyword still maps to its own specific landing page. The platform generates keywords to URL pairs automatically, with a fallback URL at the ad level to catch any gaps. The result is a dramatically simpler account structure with zero compromise on landing page relevance.
Consolidation is not the right approach for every product. The strategy Dotidot recommends and the one applied for Boataround combines both structures deliberately:
This hybrid approach means the algorithm gets enough data to learn on the long tail, while the most valuable products retain full individual-level control.
The 1 product = 1 ad group approach made sense when accounts were smaller. At scale, it becomes the thing holding performance back. Boataround's case shows that consolidation done correctly, delivers cleaner structure, faster learning, and better performance across the full catalog.
Not as a workaround. As a native, scalable solution built into the platform.
