10,529 SKUs at 17.8% ACOS, on about 12 minutes a week.

Background

CasterHQ sells industrial casters and wheels, a healthy, established business with 10,529 SKUs.

Industrial equipment is a long-tail category. Most of those SKUs sell a few units a month, which is exactly what makes them impossible to advertise by hand and expensive to ignore.

The challenge

Nobody hand-manages a catalog like that. The long tail sat undermanaged not because the owner didn't know better, but because no amount of knowing better creates the hours.

What he wanted wasn't a shortlist run well. It was the whole catalog working: every SKU covered, waste cut everywhere, without hiring a team or living in the console. So part of the catalog moved to Astra while he kept running the rest himself, in the same account, over a 12-month test.

What Astra changed

The catalog was grouped by product line and goal, each group given its play, and Astra took over the daily discipline across all of it: bids, budgets, keyword harvesting, negatives. On every SKU, not a curated shortlist.

At 10,529 SKUs that's a decision volume no operator can produce by hand. Astra produced it every 24 hours, on the slow movers as much as the bestsellers.

Results

Over a 12-month test, the Astra-run campaigns held 17.8% ACOS on roughly 12 minutes a week of the owner's attention. The campaigns the owner kept running himself over the same period: 48.6%.

Every ad dollar on the Astra side bought well over twice the sales of a dollar on the owner-run side. And 12 minutes a week is what full-catalog coverage costs him now: checking targets, not chasing bids.