An icon goes direct to consumer.
MV Agusta is one of the most storied names in motorcycling. Handcrafted in Italy since 1945, it is a brand people tattoo on themselves, the kind of marque whose history is half the product.
At the start of 2020 they opened their official online store for apparel, gear and accessories, their first serious push into selling direct to consumer. They came to us to run it: Google Ads to begin with, then quickly the whole funnel.
The brief was simple to say and hard to do: grow brand awareness across the EU and the US, and turn that attention into website visits and merchandise sales.
What none of us knew yet was that this would turn into a multi-year relationship that went far beyond a merch store. It became the launch of an entirely new product line for the brand, e-mobility, built from nothing.
A legacy brand, brand-new to selling online.
A motorcycle marque is not an ecommerce company. The instinct, the data and the muscle for selling online were not there yet, and the store launched straight into the COVID months with little to no historical data to lean on.
Then the bigger challenge arrived. MV Agusta decided to launch e-mobility: first electric bikes, later an electric scooter. This was an entirely new product category with no existing brand, no audience, and, crucially, no search demand. Nobody was Googling for an MV Agusta e-scooter, because it did not exist yet.
And it all had to work across markets and languages at once: Italy, France, Germany and the UK, then the Netherlands and Belgium, each in its own language. To make any of it scale, we focused on three things from the very first day:
- Measurement first, tracking built across every domain
- CRO, fix the funnel before pouring in spend
- Full-funnel media, build demand on Meta and capture it on Google
2020 - Foundation: tracking and CRO first
Before the e-mobility launch, we spent the first year building the measurement and CRO foundation that made it possible. A motorcycle marque is not an ecommerce company, and the apparel store opened into the COVID months with no historical data, so we did the patient groundwork first.
a Measurement before media
Before scaling a single campaign we built the tracking from zero: a Google Tag Manager container across every domain, cross-domain tracking so a visitor was not lost moving between sites, and full ecommerce plus micro-conversion tracking (form submissions, phone clicks, product-image clicks) to see every step before a sale, not just the sale.
A full macro and micro event layer across every domain, so every later decision ran on real signal.
b The cart that was losing buyers
Session recordings told the story fast: on the cart the "Proceed to Checkout" button was barely visible, and on mobile the page was not even responsive. We made the CTA dominant, added payment, shipping and refund policies inline as trust signals, and floated the mobile checkout button so it was always in reach, the kind of hands-on funnel work that compounds.
The new cart lifted cart-to-checkout starts +61% and checkout-to-purchase +36% in the first month.
That foundation pass delivered before we scaled spend: cart-to-checkout starts +61%, checkout-to-purchase +36%, product-page bounce -28%, and time in the checkout funnel -14%. Measurement and CRO first, which is exactly what made the e-mobility launch possible.
We ran the measurement, not just the media.
Across the whole relationship we owned the tracking, and that is a real part of why everything else worked. Google Tag Manager across four domains and subdomains, cross-domain stitching, ecommerce and micro-conversion tracking, Google Analytics, and the platform pixels for Google and Facebook, all built and maintained by us.
One piece stands out. MV Agusta sells configurable motorcycles, so we built tracking for the bike configurator itself. That meant the brand could see how prospects spec a bike, which options they linger on and where they drop, not just whether a transaction happened at the end.
On the analytics side we did the full job, not just the pixel: one Google Analytics property deployed across the domains, with referral exclusions, site search, custom dimensions, goals and filters, plus weekly QA so the numbers we reported on were numbers we trusted. We even stood up Yandex on the main and store domains for a second source of session recordings to learn from.
When the e-mobility business later moved onto Shopify, we owned that migration too: bringing GA4 through the Shopify Google channel, and cleaning out the old pixels so the data stayed trustworthy.
When an agency inherits someone else's tracking it spends months untangling it. Here there was nothing to untangle, because we built it clean and kept it clean. That is why every CRO and media decision after it ran on signal we trusted.
2021 - Launching e-mobility from zero
In 2021 the brand pivoted into e-mobility, starting with the Serie AMO electric bikes. This is the chapter the whole story is really about: launching a product category that did not exist yet, for a brand nobody associated with e-bikes, with zero search demand to capture.
You cannot buy demand that is not there. So we built it.
a Building demand before the product
Before the e-bike was even on sale, we ran a pre-launch campaign to build a warm audience: collecting registrations from people who wanted to be first to know, so the launch landed on an interested list instead of into silence.
This is the part most launches skip. Rather than flip the ads on and hope, we spent the run-up running interest and lead campaigns on Meta, capturing sign-ups into an audience we could retarget the moment the product went live, and feeding the pixel real signal before day one.
It worked. In about five weeks the pre-launch list grew around 14x, so the Serie AMO launched to a warm, primed audience rather than a cold start.
The pre-launch waitlist grew about 14x in five weeks, so the e-bike launched warm, not cold.
b Full-funnel, six markets, each in its own language
The launch ran full-funnel from day one. On Meta: cold acquisition, lookalike audiences, and remarketing, plus a product catalogue for dynamic ads. On Google: brand and non-brand search, Shopping, and dynamic remarketing to catch the demand the rest of the funnel created.
All of it shipped across six markets, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Belgium, with copy and creative in each local language rather than one translated set. Localization was a real workstream, not an afterthought: we ran dedicated translation passes, Dutch and French among them, so the ads read native in every market.
The standalone e-mobility store relaunched in mid-November, right into the holiday window, and it was live and selling within weeks, turning a profitable quarter straight out of the gate rather than spending months finding its feet.
The e-mobility store went from nothing to live and profitable inside its first holiday quarter.
c Why Meta, not Google, was the engine
Here is the strategic call that defined the account. For a brand-new category with no search demand, Google can only capture intent that already exists, and there was almost none. Meta is where you create the demand in the first place. So we put the budget where it would perform.
The data backed it cleanly. In the launch year e-mobility ran at 2.29x ROAS on Meta against 0.51x on Google, so Meta was about 4.5x more efficient on the same product.
Followed to its conclusion, that meant Meta drove 91% of the e-mobility revenue on 69% of the spend. Google still earned its place running brand and intent capture, but it was Meta that built the category from nothing.
Launch-year e-mobility: 2.29x ROAS on Meta vs 0.51x on Google, with Meta driving 91% of revenue on 69% of spend.
The pre-launch waitlist grew about 14x in five weeks, so the Serie AMO launched to a warm audience.
In its first year e-mobility returned 2.29x on Meta versus 0.51x on Google: Meta drove 91% of revenue on 69% of the spend.
2022 - The Rapido Serie Oro e-scooter scales
In 2022 the e-mobility flagship arrived: the Rapido Serie Oro, an electric scooter with motorcycle DNA. Demand was strong from launch, and the job became scaling it as the headline product of the line.
a Meta did the heavy lifting
The e-scooter told the same channel story as the e-bike, only sharper. On Meta the scooter returned 3.15x ROAS. On Google, where there was still no real search demand for a brand-new e-scooter, it returned 0.41x.
The cost side made the decision obvious: Meta acquired e-scooter buyers at about a tenth of Google's cost per sale. So we ran Meta as the acquisition engine, with cold acquisition, lookalikes and remarketing all feeding off the product catalogue, and kept Google focused on brand and the apparel store, where it actually earned.
On Meta the structure split cleanly into acquisition and remarketing, with budget weighted toward the markets and audiences that converted and pulled back from the ones that did not. Spending more where it works and less where it does not sounds obvious, but it is daily work, and it is the difference between a launch that scales and one that just gets expensive.
The e-scooter returned 3.15x on Meta versus 0.41x on Google, and Meta acquired buyers at about a tenth of Google's cost per sale.
b Creative, copy and the product page
Scaling a new product is as much a creative job as a media one. We built banner sets for every market, split into acquisition and remarketing, and wrote the ad copy in each local language, not one English version run through translation.
We did not run one ad and call it done. The acquisition copy ran eight variations at a time, four refreshed and four new, with banners built separately for each ad set so acquisition and remarketing each had their own look, and the whole set re-localized per market.
On the site we kept optimizing the e-scooter experience: product-page best practices, recordings and Hotjar analysis to see where buyers hesitated, and Figma mock-ups to test before building. When the 2023 model arrived with turn lights and delivery cut from three weeks to under one, we built the messaging around exactly the things buyers had been asking for.
Per-market creative and ongoing product-page CRO kept the scooter scaling as the line's flagship.
c Black Friday and the season
We ran the seasonal pushes hard, with competitor research feeding Black Friday and holiday campaigns aimed at the windows where this category does its business.
An e-scooter is a considered purchase, not an impulse buy, so remarketing did a lot of the closing: keeping the product in front of the people the acquisition campaigns had warmed up until they were ready to commit. That long consideration window is exactly why the pre-launch audience and the catalogue remarketing mattered so much.
It was during this scaled, hands-on period that the brand's marketing lead summed up the work, with the program running at -37% cost per acquisition and +24% more conversions month over month.
On the e-scooter, Meta returned 3.15x versus Google's 0.41x, at about a tenth of Google's cost per sale.
The scaled program ran at -37% cost per acquisition and +24% more conversions month over month.
One launch, many markets.
e-Mobility ran across six markets at once, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Belgium, each in its own language, and the markets behaved differently enough to be worth treating differently.
Italy and France led on volume, as you would expect for an Italian brand. But France converted at a noticeably higher rate than Italy, a real difference worth leaning into rather than averaging away.
Beyond the two leaders, the UK, Switzerland, Belgium and Austria all pulled their weight with healthy volume and good conversion rates, a reminder that a pan-European launch is really a handful of distinct launches running in parallel.
Treating each market on its own terms, its own language, creative and budget, rather than as one blended number, is what kept the whole thing efficient as it scaled.
From a merch store to an e-mobility launch.
Read end to end, this is one continuous arc. We took a legendary motorcycle brand from no real online selling to a working direct-to-consumer business, and then helped it launch an entirely new product category from zero.
The 2020 foundation proved the method: honest tracking, then evidence-based CRO that lifted cart-to-checkout starts +61% and checkout-to-purchase +36% in a single month. The measurement we built underneath it is why every number after it can be trusted.
The launch itself is the proof of the strategy. On a category with no search demand, we built demand on Meta and captured it on Google, and the discipline showed up in the returns twice: the e-bike at 2.29x on Meta and the e-scooter at 3.15x, against 0.51x and 0.41x on Google. Meta was the engine, Google the brand and intent layer.
And the scaled program was efficient as well as big: -37% cost per acquisition and +24% more conversions month over month, with the launch landing on a waitlist we had grown about 14x before the product was even on sale.
Underneath all of it sat the measurement we built on day one and the per-market discipline we never dropped: six launches running in parallel rather than one blended average. That is what let us read the channel truth so clearly and act on it without second-guessing.
If you are a brand with no online muscle yet, or you are about to launch something nobody is searching for, this is the one worth studying. The fix was no clever trick. It was the right channel for the job, clean measurement underneath it, and relentless work on the funnel.
The team at Diligent is very good at adapting to our particular business needs. The communication is quick, and we get immediate feedback and help when needed. I'm satisfied with the results, communication, and the objective-based approach. I'd recommend Diligent to anyone who'd ask.
Build the demand, then capture it.
The big lesson here is one we trust completely now: when a product category does not exist yet, search cannot save you. You build demand where attention already lives, on Meta, and you let search capture it once it is there. The data proved it twice, on the e-bike and the e-scooter.
Measurement comes first, always. We jokingly say our motto is "stay calm and collect data", and on this account it was literally the first thing we did, before a single euro of scale.
And we are not above the fiddly work: the cart button nobody could find, the mobile page that would not behave, the product feed and the per-market copy. That is where the conversions actually hide.
At our agency we specialize in exactly this for ecommerce and DTC brands: the full stack, from tracking and CRO through to the media that scales on top of it. Sometimes that means taking a motorcycle icon with roots in 1945 and helping it sell electric scooters online. We rather enjoyed that one.
- Tracking built across four domains (cross-domain, ecommerce, micro-conversions)
- Bike configurator tracking
- Cart and checkout-funnel CRO
- e-Mobility product-page CRO (recordings, mock-ups)
- Pre-launch demand generation (waitlist)
- Full-funnel Meta (acquisition, lookalike, remarketing, catalogue)
- Google Search, Shopping and dynamic remarketing
- Multi-market, multi-language launches (6 EU markets)
- Shopify and GA4 migration
