Aquagart.de

Pond, fence, fleece: a specialist range for garden and property

Behind Aquagart.de stands Aquagart Trading GmbH. The family business started out as a seller on eBay in 2007 and today supplies customers all over Europe, with a focus on Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. The range extends from pond liners, pond underlay and bank matting to wildlife, forestry and pasture fencing, weed control fabric, shade sails and tarpaulins. Aquagart is currently expanding its range to include building materials.

What makes this Shopware shop special: there is no direct competitor with the same range. In the pond segment, Aquagart competes with specialist pond retailers, in the fencing segment with entirely different suppliers. DIY stores overlap only in part, as they lack the depth of range. For SEO and Google Ads this means: two markets, two competitive fields, two strategies. On top of that, the business is seasonal, with its peak from March to May and a second high in autumn.

Key facts:

Aquagart has been working with arboro since October 2025, initially on tracking and Google Ads. The starting point was not a new campaign concept, but the question of whether the numbers were right. To answer it, arboro set up server-side tracking with Consent Mode v2, Enhanced Conversions for Google Ads and the Meta Conversions API, compliant with the GDPR. Since then, Aquagart has been recording 29.2 % more page views than with browser-based tracking. These are not new visitors. They are visitors who were previously missing from the statistics.

On this basis, we rebuilt the Google Ads account for Germany and Austria. Weed control fabric, pond supplies, fencing and building materials each run in their own campaigns, and seasonal priorities drive budget planning. In the product feed, custom labels sort items by size, material and fabric weight. Performance Max and AI-driven bidding strategies handle delivery, while we set the goals and structure. The Shopping ads run via the arboro CSS, and billiger.de was added as a price comparison site.

The results after twelve months compared with the previous year: almost 16 % lower ad spend, around 35 % more recorded conversion value and a ROAS around 60 % higher. Cost per conversion fell by almost 24 %. Performance Max showed the strongest gains, with 48 % more conversion value at 4 % lower cost. The search campaigns maintain their conversion value with 57 % less budget.

Part of the increase in conversion value is due to more accurate measurement, as the previous year was still recorded without server-side tracking. The cost savings are independent of this.

At the beginning of 2026, SEO and content work was added, in the middle of a difficult phase. A redesign before the collaboration with arboro had changed the navigation in a way that made it harder for customers to find their products. Aquagart quickly returned to the proven version, but visibility on Google still kept falling until April. Since that low point, the domain’s visibility index has risen by 65 % and is back at its best level from before the redesign.

The blog offered the biggest lever. Many of Aquagart’s customers do the work themselves and are looking for products to repair, renovate or build ponds, streams or fencing. Before ordering pond liner or wildlife fencing, they want to know why their pond water is turning green or how to fix rabbit wire. The blog brings in almost half of all clicks from Google Search.

Instead of adding new articles, arboro first reviewed the 100-plus existing ones: keep, revise or remove. Competing posts that caused cannibalization were separated or merged, weak ones redirected to stronger ones. After 40 revised articles, the magazine’s visibility has more than doubled, from 0.0551 to 0.1287. Guides on green pond water, mole netting or the right fleece thickness are once again appearing more often in Google’s top 5 and are also cited as a source in AI search. The article on rabbit wire climbed from position 10 to position 2. The work is not quite finished yet.

With AI search in mind, the next goal is to advise customers in every phase of a potential purchase. In addition, an AI-supported customer journey analysis is planned to open up new paths in content marketing.

Once customers arrive in the shop, nothing should hold them up. In July, arboro analyzed the product pages, cart and checkout and prioritized the optimizations by urgency. The first ones are live: the most important product features now appear compactly at the top of the product page, the shop’s benefits are more visible, and the delivery time is highlighted in the final checkout step. Anyone who adds something to the cart gets a clear confirmation, while the remove button moves into the background. The cart is being optimized on an ongoing basis.

The impact in the shop will become visible by the next peak season at the latest. Until then, faster loading times on mobile devices, the remaining blog articles and the expansion of building materials as a year-round mainstay will follow. The next big step is a customer journey analysis. It looks at the shop, navigation, products and content from the customer’s perspective and shows where hurdles still remain on the way from the first search term to the order.

Three lessons from the project that apply to almost every online shop:

Thomas Traut, co-founder and Managing Director of Aquagart Trading GmbH, says: “In the end, what counts for us is what sells in the shop. That’s why we liked that arboro didn’t start by tweaking the campaigns, but first checked whether our numbers were right at all. Today we spend less on Google Ads and can see exactly which ads pay off. We’re pleased that our blog ranks so well on Google, because most people who buy from us do the work themselves. Coordination is quick and direct, and if something gets stuck in the shop, the team is there.”