Ruby Digital Wins Gold at Global Performance Marketing Awards for Transforming a Local Retail Institution
South African performance marketing company Ruby Digital ended October on a global high, winning Gold for Best Retail, E-commerce & Consumer Campaign at the Global Performance Marketing Awards (GPMA) for its work with Gelmar, recognising a strategy that helped translate decades of offline brand strength into measurable digital growth.
Founded 90 years ago, Gelmar had built an established South African retail presence with more than 50 physical stores but entered its partnership with Ruby Digital with little organic search presence and no structured paid search strategy.
The opportunity was therefore not to create awareness of an unknown brand, but to build a digital presence capable of complementing the authority the retailer had already established offline.
It was also competing in a very different environment online.
In search, Gelmar was competing for visibility alongside major local and international retailers including Builders Warehouse, Takealot, Amazon.co.za, Leroy Merlin and Temu.
This made the challenge bigger than simply increasing website traffic.
Gelmar needed to become more discoverable when consumers were actively searching for the products it sells.
That opportunity was rooted in consumer intent. Gelmar’s extensive product catalogue is naturally suited to search, where consumers looking for specific home-improvement products are often doing so with an existing need.
The strategy focused on making Gelmar more visible at those moments, including searches from consumers who may not already have been looking for the brand by name.
At the centre of Ruby Digital’s approach was the decision to treat SEO and PPC as one connected search strategy rather than two independent channels.
Organic keyword data informed paid-search targeting, while paid-search performance helped shape organic content priorities.
Technical SEO improvements, content optimisation and paid-search activity were aligned around the same commercial objective, allowing insights from one channel to inform decisions in the other.
The strategy began by strengthening the foundations of Gelmar’s digital presence before scaling and refining activity over time.
The work addressed technical search issues, created a stronger keyword and content architecture, and progressively developed the paid-search programme as performance data matured.
The resulting growth formed the basis of the campaign’s international recognition.
Over the campaign period, organic revenue increased by 56.9% year on year, organic transactions grew by 67%, PPC conversions increased by 106.4%, and organic search accounted for 37.8% of all e-commerce sessions.
For Ebert Grobler, Co-Founder and Group CEO of Ruby Digital, the value of the recognition lies as much in what the work demonstrates as in the award itself.
“What makes this recognition meaningful is the performance behind it. Gelmar already had something incredibly valuable: decades of trust, a strong product offering and an established South African brand. Our opportunity was to help translate that strength into the digital environment and connect it more effectively with how people are searching and buying today.
What this demonstrates is that South African brands and agencies can produce work that stands up on a global stage. When strategy is grounded in commercial objectives, supported by data and executed across channels rather than in silos, locally developed work can compete at an international standard. That is what makes this recognition valuable for Gelmar, for our team and, more broadly, for South Africa’s marketing industry.”
The Global Performance Marketing Awards Gold forms part of a broader period of industry recognition for Ruby Digital.
The agency was also named a 2026 Search Engine Land Agency of the Year – PPC finalist, further reinforcing the performance credentials behind its work.
Additional recognition this year includes Global 100 – Best Marketing, as well as Best Marketing & Advertising Firm of the Year – 2027 – United States recognition from both American Business Vanguard and The Strategist.
Ruby Digital has now received recognition from Global 100, American Business Vanguard and The Strategist for two consecutive years.
While these accolades provide broader recognition, the Gelmar campaign offers a tangible example of the work behind it.
It demonstrates how an established South African business can use performance marketing to translate existing brand equity into greater digital visibility and measurable commercial growth.
For marketers, fractional CMOs and business leaders, the wider lesson is particularly relevant.
A business can have decades of customer trust and strong offline awareness without automatically holding the same competitive advantage online.
Gelmar’s experience shows that building a stronger digital position does not necessarily require reinventing an established brand.
It can instead mean making the equity a business has already built more discoverable at the moments when potential customers are actively looking for its products.
The Gelmar story demonstrates how established brand strength, consumer search intent and a commercially focused performance strategy can work together to create another avenue for growth.
The GPMA Gold provides international recognition of that work and, more broadly, another example of South African brands and agencies producing performance marketing capable of competing on a global stage.
About Ruby Digital
Ruby Digital is a South African digital marketing agency focused on performance-led digital growth.
Its work spans SEO, PPC and wider digital strategy, with an emphasis on connecting marketing activity to measurable commercial outcomes.
