Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 09.09.2026 
Author: Mateusz Herduś, Senior Paid Media Specialist
About S&M
We are Sales&More.
For more than 18 years, as an independent 360° media agency, we have been helping shape Poland’s digital advertising market.
This year is particularly special for us. Not only because we have symbolically come of age as a business, but also because we were named Performance Agency of the Year at the Performance Marketing Diamonds.
And performance marketing itself is going through something of a renaissance.
That tends to happen when times get tougher. And there is little doubt that they have.
Uncertainty is increasingly shaping business decisions. Companies are becoming more cautious with budgets, more rigorous about measuring effectiveness, and more likely to ask a very simple question: “What ROI will this deliver?”
Paradoxically, that makes this a very good time for agencies like ours.
Especially in a market like Poland.
Poland has one of the most developed and competitive digital advertising ecosystems in Europe, with almost 30 million internet users across different age groups, platforms, screens and touchpoints.
That level of maturity also makes the market highly demanding. Consumers are harder to reach, harder to surprise and more selective about the content they engage with. Clients, in turn, expect more from their media partners.
Simply being present in digital is no longer enough. Campaigns need to perform, scale and deliver a measurable impact.
For years, however, we have also been challenging a persistent perception of performance marketing: that it is primarily about the bottom of the funnel.
Quick results. Leads. Sales. Ideally measured in CPL or CPS.
But that is only one part of performance marketing.
An extremely important part, certainly, but still part of a much bigger picture.
Businesses are increasingly recognising that you cannot keep optimising existing demand forever. At some point, you need to start creating future demand.
And that is exactly what the project that won us a European Paid Media Award was about.
More broadly, it is also what our partnership with Morizon-Gratka Group has been about.
The Challenge We Had to Solve
Gratka.pl is one of Poland’s leading real estate classifieds platforms. Historically, the brand’s media activities were heavily focused on performance campaigns, while investment in brand awareness was gradually reduced. This led to a situation familiar to many marketers: rising costs per click, weakening brand recognition, and increasing dependence on existing demand and seasonality.
The competitive environment made the situation even more challenging. The real estate portal market was strongly dominated by Otodom and OLX, which together accounted for approximately 43% of branded search queries in the category in the first quarter of 2026. At the same time, the growing presence of AI-generated answers in search engines began to place additional pressure on declining organic traffic.
Our strategic conclusion was that the choice of a real estate portal often takes place before a user visits a specific website. When someone begins searching for an apartment or house, they often enter the name of a platform they already know and remember into the search engine. The competitive battle was therefore not limited to the number of listings, prices, or platform functionality. Above all, the objective was to make Gratka the first brand chosen spontaneously.
Our Approach: Brand as a Tool Supporting Performance
We deliberately based our targeting approach on high-intent signals rather than broad demographic or interest-based audiences. At the upper-funnel stage, YouTube In-Stream and bumper ads were targeted at users demonstrating real estate intent or searching for competitor brands. We also prioritised Poland’s seven largest metropolitan areas, where both search demand and competitive pressure were the strongest. This allowed us to build reach without sacrificing relevance and to influence users close to the moment of choosing a real estate portal.
TikTok helped increase the campaign’s reach, while Google Search, Dynamic Search Ads, Performance Max, Demand Gen, the Google Display Network, Microsoft Ads, and catalogue ads across Meta platforms captured and converted the demand generated at earlier stages of the funnel.
The campaign ran from 27 December 2025 to 15 March 2026 and covered the seasonal peak in interest in the Polish real estate market. We assigned a specific role to each channel, but we did not allow the funnel to become a collection of disconnected activities. The Gratka.pl logo, brand colours, and communication style were also consistently incorporated into product-led creatives. Every interaction with a performance ad was intended to strengthen the brand at the same time.
The campaign’s creative concept was based on the message: “Happiness begins with finding your own address.” Instead of focusing exclusively on property specifications, we demonstrated the emotional value of finding a place that can be called home. This gave the campaign a human and engaging character without compromising its commercial objective.
Proving Causality, Not Just Correlation
Our greatest expert challenge was measuring the results. Moving part of the investment from proven lower-funnel activities to video campaigns naturally raised questions about efficiency. Standard advertising-platform reporting could show reach, clicks, and conversions, but it did not allow us to determine with sufficient confidence whether the brand-building activities had genuinely generated additional business results.
We therefore combined Google Brand Lift and Meta Brand Lift studies with search-trend analysis, traffic and lead data, and Google Causal Impact analysis. The model compared the actual results with an estimated scenario in which the additional brand-building activities had not been launched. This allowed us to separate the campaign’s impact from seasonality and the effects generated by performance activities running in parallel.
Results
The campaign exceeded all the objectives we had set. The Google Brand Lift study showed an increase in awareness of 3.5 percentage points. Brand favourability and purchase intent results exceeded high benchmarks by approximately 78% and 33%, respectively. Meta Brand Lift, meanwhile, showed an increase in ad recall at approximately twice the platform benchmark.
More importantly, the brand effect translated into active demand. The number of branded search queries increased by approximately 54% in the first month of the campaign, more than twice as fast as for the closest competitor.
The number of clicks from branded campaigns increased by 32.5%, conversions generated by branded queries rose by 236%, and the cost per lead decreased by 59%. In the first quarter of 2026, the number of paid sessions was 150% higher than in the corresponding period of 2025, exceeding the original objective of 100% growth.
The causal analysis confirmed statistically significant growth across all five conversion actions examined. This included an estimated 70% increase in phone-number clicks in the agency listings segment and a 106% increase in the property developer segment.
What Does This Recognition Mean to Us?
Winning the Real Estate & Property Campaign of the Year award at the European Paid Media Awards is particularly important to us because it recognises the work of the entire agency and client team: strategists, paid media specialists, analysts, creative teams, and representatives of Grupa Morizon-Gratka. Achieving this result was possible because of our shared willingness to challenge the status quo.
The most important conclusion from this campaign is highly practical. Brand investment does not have to be justified exclusively through awareness metrics, and performance marketing does not have to be limited to capturing existing demand. When creative, targeting, and measurement are designed as one coherent system, brand-building activities can become a measurable tool supporting performance results.
This campaign proved that they can also be an exceptionally efficient tool.
