RS Group PLC, the FTSE 250 industrial and electrical products distributor, has increased Paid Search revenue by 6% while reducing ad spend by 5%, after adopting Corvidae AI’s patented session reconstruction technology to feed accurate customer journey data into its automated bidding.
The four-month controlled pilot, run across RS Group PLC’s Italian operation, improved return on ad spend by 12%. On the strength of the result, the process is now being rolled out to all other regions.
The work began with a measurement problem rather than a bidding one. After RS Group PLC moved to a strict “reject all” first-party cookie consent model, established platforms including Adobe Analytics, Google Ads and Microsoft Ads were left to model and estimate the customer journeys they could no longer see.
“We had a long-term ambition to move away from last-click attribution because we knew it was the right strategic direction, but we lacked a robust tool to execute it,” said Joshua Bamsey, Senior Manager of Performance Marketing Effectiveness at RS Group PLC. “This transition was accelerated when we updated our first-party cookie policies to a strict ‘reject all’ consent model. This change meant traditional platforms relied heavily on modelling and guessing based on significantly less data.”
Corvidae rebuilt those journeys without using a single cookie. Across all RS Group PLC properties worldwide, over the same four-month test period, it tracked £193m more revenue than Adobe Analytics, and covered over 95% of the active customer base. Its patented technology reconstructs customer journeys from raw first-party eventstream data using predictive AI, with no cookies and no persistent identifiers, and is compliant with GDPR and CCPA by architecture.
The reconstructed data showed customer journeys substantially longer than the platforms had reported: 46% longer in the UK and 68% longer across the EU. It also exposed channel overlap invisible to platform reporting, with 58% of all sales touching a Paid Search ad and 72% of those also involving an Organic Search interaction.
Rather than delivering that intelligence as a report, Corvidae fed the reconstructed journeys directly into RS Group PLC’s bidding algorithms and into Power BI via API, so the data works inside the business rather than only inside an advertising platform.
“Even at our size, we require highly tailored solutions to ensure our data doesn’t just sit in a ‘walled garden’ but integrates directly into our own core systems – Power BI and the Google stack,” said Paul Morris, Senior Director, EMEA Performance Marketing and Web eCommerce at RS Group PLC. “Corvidae partnered with us to achieve exactly that, giving us a 95%-plus ability to track and understand our complete journeys.”
Morris added, “The board and the Executive Committee are highly aware of our analytics evolution. We see Data-Driven Attribution, and by extension Corvidae, as a core component of it. It enables us to become far less reliant on bottom-of-funnel channels and adopt a true 360-degree approach to our channel mix – paving the way for far more aggressive growth budgeting.”
Chris Liversidge, CEO and Founder of Corvidae AI, said the underlying problem is not specific to RS Group PLC. “Every advertiser buying Google and Meta is bidding on incomplete data, because the platforms cannot see the top of the funnel and the tools sold to fix that all depend on third-party signal that consent rules have already broken. No amount of reporting corrects a bid that was placed on a guess. What we did at RS Group PLC was not build a better report. We rebuilt the journeys, fed them back into the bidding, and the revenue followed – on less spend, not more.”
Notes to editors
Corvidae AI is an ad performance automation platform. Its patented AI reconstructs customer journeys from raw first-party data, with no cookies or identifiers, and feeds that reconstructed truth back into advertising platforms to increase the revenue produced by existing ad budgets. Founded in 2008 and based in Edinburgh, Corvidae works with brands including RS Group PLC, QVC, Menkind, Macmillan and Groupe SEB. corvidae.ai
The technology is protected by granted patents held by parent company QueryClick Ltd, under the title A System and Method of Reconstructing Browser Interaction from Session Data Having Incomplete Tracking Data:
- US 12,461,984, granted 4 November 2025
- EP 3888325, granted 20 November 2024, with unitary effect registered on 10 January 2025 across 18 EU member states, plus separate validation in Ireland, Spain and the United Kingdom. The European opposition period expired with no Notice of Opposition filed
- Originating UK application 1819613.9, filed 30 November 2018, via PCT/GB2019/053404. Also filed in Canada and Australia
Funding: Corvidae has raised £5m, led by Edinburgh business angel syndicate Archangels alongside the Scottish Investment Bank.
