When a Saudi fragrance house came to us, its search and paid media were run by two suppliers who never saw each other’s plan. Paid was bidding on searches the store already won organically, and nobody owned which products deserved the traffic. This post uses that engagement to show what split suppliers cost, how to check for it in your own accounts in half an hour, and when separate specialists are still the right call.
What split suppliers cost, in one engagement
Al Majed for Oud sells perfumes, oud, incense and gift sets to customers who shop in Arabic and in English. By the time we met, the store had been outgrown and the marketing budget was split: one supplier ran SEO, another ran Google Ads, and each reported on its own cadence.
Three things followed from that split, and we found all three in the first weeks of the engagement:
- Paid search was bidding on queries the store already ranked for organically. The same customer was being paid for twice.
- Category pages were optimised for neither channel. The SEO supplier had no say in landing pages, and the paid supplier had no say in category structure.
- Nobody owned the question of which products deserved the traffic. Each supplier was measured on its own channel, so no one was measured on the store.
The fix was not a cleverer bid strategy. We rebuilt the store, moved years of catalogue and order history with zero data loss, and then ran eCommerce SEO and paid media as one programme: category and product SEO, structured data across the catalogue, and Google Ads planned in the same room, with paid covering the searches organic had not won yet and pulling back where it had. Revenue grew 340% in the seven months after the migration, measured against the pre-migration baseline. That figure belongs to the whole programme, the rebuilt store included, not to the consolidation alone. The full record is in the Al Majed for Oud case study.
The five seams where the money goes
Most lists of “vendor management costs” are about admin: contracts, invoices, time zones. Those are real but small. The expensive costs sit in the seams between suppliers, where each one did its own part correctly and the result still went missing. These are the five we look for first, with the sign that gives each one away.
| Seam | What it looks like | How you spot it |
|---|---|---|
| Paid and organic overlap | Ads run on queries you already rank for in the top three | The query appears in both your paid search-terms report and your organic top-ten list |
| Orphaned landing pages | Ads send traffic to pages nobody is improving | The top paid landing pages are not in anyone’s SEO or CRO plan |
| Two reporting clocks | Decisions wait for the slower report | Budget changes happen monthly although the data moves daily |
| Migrations without a marketing calendar | A replatform or redesign lands in the middle of a campaign or a peak season | The development schedule and the campaign calendar have never been in the same document |
| Ownerless outcomes | Every supplier hits its own target while revenue stays flat | No single report shows acquisition, conversion and retention together |
At Al Majed, the first and the last of these were the costly ones. The overlap was direct waste; the ownerless outcome was why nobody had noticed.
A thirty-minute check you can run this week
You do not need us to find out whether this is happening to you. The overlap check takes one person about half an hour with access to Google Ads and Search Console.
- In Google Ads, export the search terms report for the last ninety days, with cost and conversions.
- In Search Console, export the queries where your average position is 3.0 or better over the same period.
- Put both in one sheet and match on the query text. Exact matches first; then close variants.
- Add up the paid cost on the matched rows. That is the money spent on searches you already win.
- For each matched query, decide one of three things: pull paid back and watch organic hold; keep paid because the ad wins a different placement; or hand the query to one owner who answers for both.
A small overlap is normal and sometimes deliberate: a brand term with a competitor bidding on it, or a product launch that needs both placements. A large overlap with no one deciding is the split-supplier cost in a single number.
When separate specialists are the right answer
One team is not always better, and we say so in proposals. Separate suppliers work when:
- The disciplines genuinely do not touch. A brand film and a technical SEO audit can live apart without a seam.
- You have an in-house owner with the time and the authority to run the integration. The seams still exist, but someone is paid to stand in them.
- The budget is too small for a combined programme. A single focused review and a narrow scope can be the honest answer.
What does not work is the middle case: several suppliers, no integrator, and a budget large enough that the overlap matters. That was Al Majed before the engagement, and it is the shape of most of the “why is revenue flat” conversations we have.
- 1Do the disciplines touch, as paid and organic search do?NoApart is fine: a brand film, a technical SEO audit
- 2Is nobody in-house given the time and authority to integrate?NoAn owner stands in the seams: separate can work
- 3Is the budget large enough that the overlap matters?NoToo small to combine: a focused review and narrow scope
What one roadmap means in practice
When we run search and paid together, four things change. There is one plan, written before any work starts, with the number each channel answers for. There is one weekly review, in Prism, that shows what shipped, what is blocked and what moved. Paid pulls back where organic has won and covers where it has not, decided in the same meeting. And the store’s own roadmap, from category structure to checkout, is on the same page as the marketing plan, so a migration is never a surprise to the campaign.
If you would rather keep your current suppliers and add an owner, the one team, not five page describes the engagement shapes, including the one where we coordinate rather than replace.
Written by
Shweta Agarwal
Chief Operating Officer, Vinove
Shweta runs the operating side of the group, holding delivery, process and accountability consistent across the group. Her focus is on the systems that let teams grow without losing the standard they started with.
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